[Biojava-dev] Re: Problem with ranks

[george waldon]

Thank you Mark and Richard for your exhaustive answers. This is very much appreciated. I am not a database person and I was completely missing the other side of the story.

Perhaps the Bio* projects could agree quickly on ranks before someone populates a database with exotic values. It seems that there is a consensus on this list for having ranks positive and non null integers when they are defined and equals to zero otherwise. This would also solve the problem of the nullable rank of BioEntryRelationship (which could be then equivalent to an integer value equal to zero).

Also, I improperly reported that SimpleRankedDocRef compareTo method does not use rank. My apologies for the mistake.

Thanks
George