25 Sep
2014
25 Sep
'14
3:04 p.m.
Hi guys,
There are a couple of places in XWiki where we use trees to display
structured / hierarchical data. Are trees a good solution for data
visualization in those cases? Can those trees be improved? Are there
other places in XWiki where you would like to see a tree?
Let me review some of the trees we currently have:
1. Document Index Tree
wiki > space > page > [attachments | page]
This tree is also used in the WYSIWYG editor when you create a link to
a wiki page or to an attachment. It shows the spaces on the first
level and then under each space the parent-child hierarchy of
documents from that space. If a document has attachments then a
special child node is added. The tree can also display wikis on the
first level and then spaces on the second.
So it mixes two hierarchies: wiki > space > page > attachment and
parent > child. This can be confusing. For instance Blog.WebHome has
Main.WebHome as parent, but you don't see Blog.WebHome under the
Main.WebHome node in the tree because it is in a different space.
2. XAR Import
space > page
This is a very simple tree with only two levels. I don't have any
problem with it. Would be cool if it would show more information, like
attachments or objects, but it's a bit more complex to get this kind
of data from the XAR without reading the documents first.
3. Dynamic Hierarchy Macro (
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Dynamic+Hierarchy+Macro
)
parent page > child page
Unlike the Document Index Tree, this tree uses only the parent-child
hierarchy. You don't see the spaces but at least you get the full
parent-child hierarchy. This time Blog.WebHome is a child of the
Main.WebHome node.
I'm not sure it's better than the Document Index Tree, at least not on
the default XWiki documents, maybe because the document titles and the
way we set the parent in the default distribution is not very
consistent.
----------
WDYT about these trees?
As a developer, I would love to see a full XWiki Entity Tree:
wiki > space > page > [translations | attachments | objects |
classProperties] > object > objectProperties
As in http://imgur.com/q0br8xT .
As a user, I don't know. You tell me :)
Thanks,
Marius