15 Dec
2009
15 Dec
'09
3:40 p.m.
Hi,
I'd like to propose a refactoring for org.xwiki.model.DocumentName/
AttachmentName.
There are currently 2 problems with the current implementation:
- DocumentName doesn't support nested spaces (we need that for the
future)
- We need to generalize the concept of resource names so that we can
use the generic concept in the Model in some APIs
Thus I'd like to propose:
enum ResourceType
- WIKI, DOCUMENT, SPACE, ATTACHMENT
ResourceName
- ResourceName(String name, ResourceName parent)
- get/setName()
- get/setParent(ResourceName)
- get/setType(ResourceType)
DocumentName extends ResourceName
- DocumentName(String pageName, SpaceName parent)
AttachmentName extends ResourceName
- AttachmentName(String fileName, DocumentName parent)
WikiName extends ResourceName
- WikiName(String wikiName)
SpaceName extends ResourceName
- SpaceName(String spaceName, SpaceName parent)
- SpaceName(String spaceName, WikiName parent)
Open questions and comments
========================
- Should we replace "Name" by "Reference", i.e. DocumentReference
instead of DocumentName, WikiReference instead of WikiName?
- Note: A name (or reference) isn't resistant to change. Resources
(Document, Space, Wiki, etc) must also have an Identifier (unique id)
to uniquely identify them. For example a Document can be moved from
one space to another (the DocumentName changes in this case).
- The scheme above allows to map this easily to the JCR API
- Do we want helper methods for locating the wiki in which a
DocumentName is? That would mean adding:
WikiName DocumentName.getWiki() (algo: getParent() till getType ==
WIKI or null)
Same question for getting the last Space or Wiki from AttachmentName
- Do we want a helper constructor to make it easier to create a
DocumentName? With the proposal above it means:
new DocumentName("page", new SpaceName("space", new
WikiName("wiki")));
A helper constructor could be: DocumentName(String page, String space,
String wiki).
Problems: a) we would need another constructor to support a list of
spaces and b) if there are fields other than the name to set on
ResourceNames later on, it's not going to work as smoothly)
Factory and Serializer
=================
This is a big question I haven't yet solved. We have 2 options:
1) have specialized Factory/Serializer. For ex: DocumentNameFactory,
DocumentNameSerializer
2) have generic ones: ResourceNameFactory/ResourceNameSerializer
2) seems nicer initially but the problem with 2) is that we need a
global String representation of any resource in the system. There are
2 problems with that:
- we may not want that. For example when the user is asked to enter a
document name in a field, we may not need/want to parse this as a
general resource that could for example point to an attachment (and
btw as a consequence allow entering "@" which is our separator for
attachments)
- it's very hard to add new Resource types later on (since we'd need
more special characters to separate them and this means these chars
wouldn't be allowed in names for pages for ex)
The other option is to have 2) but with the type passed as parameter:
ResourceName ResourceNameFactory.create(String stringRepresentation,
ResourceType)
However this simply means that ResourceNameFactory would be a factory
for actual factories (DocumentNameFactory, AttachmentNameFactory, etc)
so I don't really see the added value in our component-based world (we
can look up the right factory directly).
Thus IMO we want 1).
WDYT?
Thanks
-Vincent