# When good design decisions go bad... ## When good design decisions go bad... posted on Wednesday, August 25, 2004 10:51 AM Hmmphh...well, I'm working on a security system for a new framework I'm building at work, this has the concept of hierarchical content types and inherited roles;so you can assign a role on a parent and have it trickle down to child content types, reducing the legwork on assigning permissions within a system. Well, I'm having to redo some stuff now since I foolishly decided to define the content type hierarchy in XML instead of in the DB; mainly because of some short-sighted thinking I'd done when developing the presentation infrastructure earlier which \*correctly\* uses XML for defining page properties. Well, what I forgot was that I store information about how the inheritence infrastructure is defined in the DB; I need to do this in order to control the return of multiple disparate items in the system, allowing me to only return those items on which a user has 'view' permission. Ah well, we all make mistakes - I guess this is a good exemplar of not thinking about enough of a system to make appropriate decisions in advance of coding. Not a very interesting post for most, just had to get it off my chest...