https://github.com/curran/document-history

A space efficient representation for text document revisions.
https://github.com/curran/document-history

Last synced: about 2 months ago
JSON representation

A space efficient representation for text document revisions.

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/curran/document-history
• Owner: curran
• License: mit
• Created: 2015-07-30T15:38:45.000Z (over 9 years ago)
• Default Branch: master
• Last Pushed: 2015-07-30T16:07:30.000Z (over 9 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2024-10-15T11:07:48.633Z (3 months ago)
• Size: 148 KB
• Stars: 0
• Watchers: 3
• Forks: 0
• Open Issues: 0
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md
  • License: LICENSE

Awesome Lists containing this project

README

        
# document-history

A space efficient representation for text document revisions.

When developing a persistent representation for editable documents (such as blog posts), the question arises "What about storing the edit history?" There are two primary strategies for doing this, you can either

 * store the full text of each revision, or

 * store the differences between revisions.

Storing the full text of each revision is simple to implement, but not space efficient. Imagine a text document that is 1000 lines long. If a user edits a single line of that document 100 times, it causes 1000 * 100 = 100000 lines of text to be stored for the revision history with this approach. Even though this is not space efficient, this strategy is commonly used. For example, [Wikipedia stores the full text of each revision](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Text_table).

Storing the differences between revisions is a more space efficient approach, but is more complex to implement. Imagine a text document that is 1000 lines long. If a user edits a single line of that document 100 times, it causes (roughly) 1000 + (1 * 100) = 1100 lines of text to be stored for the revision history with this approach. **The purpose of this library is to make it easy to implement this diff-based approach for storing document revisions.**

## Related Work

 * [NPM: historical](https://www.npmjs.com/package/historical) A Mongoose plugin that archives document diffs and manages document history. This library does not do diffs within strings, but does diffs at the level of document properties only.

 * [Git Data Structures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)#Data_structures) Git stores file revision histories using differences.

 * [StackOverflow: Ways to implement data versioning in MongoDB](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4185105/ways-to-implement-data-versioning-in-mongodb)