3 Oct
2011
3 Oct
'11
8:02 p.m.
Hi Vincent,
Thanks for the feedback. See my comments below.
On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
The idea was to let XWiki applications use the standard edit/create
form offered by the XWiki platform. I can drop (2) and let each
application add those hidden input fields in their edit sheet if they
need to generate the pane name automatically. Regarding (3), the
reason I proposed to hide the Save buttons and show Create only when
those specific request parameters are set is because I wanted to keep
the current behavior for normal wiki pages and existing XWiki
applications. My basic need is to distinguish between create and edit
form. The simplest solution is to show the Create button instead of
Save buttons when the document is new, but that's an important change
(for instance lots of functional test will be affected) and I didn't
want to make it in 3.2RC1.
Hi Marius,
Disclaimer: I really haven't had the time to think about this so my comments below
are based after thinking about it for 10 minutes only. IMO this requires some more
brainstorming/thinking.
On Oct 3, 2011, at 5:33 PM, Marius Dumitru Florea wrote:
Hi devs,
For the upcoming Application Within Minutes I need to enhance the
XWiki platform with the ability to generate the page name
automatically when creating a new wiki page. For some applications it
doesn't make sense to have two creation steps: (1) specify the wiki
page name (i.e. the location) and then (2) edit the new wiki page with
the specified name. Let me give you two examples:
* It would be cool to be able to create a new blog post in a single
step. The blog post name could be generated from the blog post title
specified in the edit form.
* An application that manages holiday requests doesn't need meaningful
page names (i.e. free text, like a blog post would have) but something
like Request_XYZ, where XYZ is a unique counter/identifier.
These applications should be able to create new wiki pages with
automatically generated names without writing their custom create
forms.
Since 3.2RC1 was planed for today and these changes are in the 3.2
roadmap, here's a proposal that I think I can implement quickly and
safely:
(1) Introduce two new components:
// Used to generate a document name that doesn't have to be unique
(e.g. by cleaning the document title).
DocumentReferenceGenerator#generate(DocumentModelBridge):DocumentReference
// Used to make a document name unique (by suffixing an unique
counter/identifier)
DocumentReferenceDifferentiator#differentiate(DocumentReference):DocumentReference
I don't see the need for 2 components. I do see
the need for one component:
The two components I proposed serve two different concerns:
1. Generate a document name from the structured and/or non-structured
data of a document. The most simple implementation is to use the
document title as the document name but IMO an XWiki application
should be able to write its own generator (in groovy for instance).
---> Ludovic and devs writing XWiki applications should confirm if
this is really needed.
2. Modify a document reference to make it unique.
I believe XWiki applications have to be able to mix implementations of
these components.
DocumentReferenceGenerator#generate(String prefix)
Then you could have one implementation of it that that takes the prefix and appends a
number to make it unique.
Now for using the title as the reference name, we don't need anything:
new DocumentReference(wiki, space, doc.getTitle());
(2) Modify editinline.vm to store
"documentReferenceGenerator" and
"documentReferenceDifferentiator" request parameters in two hidden
input fields so that they are passed to the save action. Obviously,
these are component hints.
(3) Modify editactions.vm to replace "Save & View" + "Save &
Continue"
with "Create" when "documentReferenceGenerator" or
"documentReferenceDifferentiator" (or both) request parameters are
set.
I don't see how what use case (3) solves. Can you
explain?
You go to the Blog home page and click the Create button which takes you to:
/xwiki/bin/edit/Blog/TemporaryBlogPost253?template=Blog.BlogPostTemplate&parent=Blog.WebHome&documentReferenceGenerator=custom
If we keep "Save & Continue" then it will be possible to create a new
document everytime your click it because the factors that influence
the generated document reference can change (e.g. you modify the
title). We could keep only "Save & View" but I thought "Create"
is
better from UX point of view.
(4) Modify SaveAction to take into account these
two request
parameters (only if they are specified). Something along these lines:
generateDocumentReference(doc)
synchronize(lock) {
doc.copyDocument(differentiate(generatedDocumentReference)).save();
}
I'm not sure where to place the two components from (1) though. WDYT?
The component I mentioned above could go in xwiki-platform-model.
<general remarks>
Now I'm not very comfortable with hacking the default vm files to add more
"if" in the code to support even more parameters.
Why not use the new sheet system you've started putting in place to specify a
specific vm to use?
More generally I'd like that we think about removing big spaghettis code for vm and
be able to have more vms and that we can choose which vm to use where.
Also, as usual, I'd like to that someone who wants to build on the xwiki dev platform
be able to not use this if he doesn't need to (hence my comment above about being able
to selectively choose what behavior to have/use instead of having lots of "if"s
in vm files. Especially since this new behavior doesn't seem to be good for the
majority of use cases but only for some.
Said differently use an Object-oriented approach or a
component-based approach instead of a big-ball-of-mud approach ;)
Well, that sounds nice, but Velocity templates are not object oriented
and it's not easy for an XWiki application to reuse/customize an
existing template without duplicating its code.
Thanks,
Marius
</general remarks>
Note that as always, I'd prefer if we do this:
- discuss how we would like it to be in the near future
- then only discuss how to reach that based on constraints (release contraint, etc) and
see how many steps we need to get there
Thanks
-Vincent
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