[xwiki-devs] Implementing pseudoversions

Hello devs, Auto-saving the content during long edit sessions, to prevent the complete loss of data in case of browser or OS crashes, (http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-1581) is a pretty useful feature that people have been asking for. For 1.9 there will be the possibility to enable autosave. However, the implementation is pretty basic, more of a hack on top of the current architecture: an asynchronous JavaScript calls periodically save & continue, marking the saved versions as minor and setting the version comment to "(Autosaved)". This approach has some obvious disadvantages: - A lot of minor versions are created during the editing - Cancel does not undo the changes (a revert could be done to the version at the beginning of the editing session, which creates yet another document version) ... but at least it's a start. For properly implementing this in the future, some important changes are needed. In particular, the support for pseudoversions (http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-500). Pseudoversions are temporary versions of a document being edited, and can be seen as short-lived versioning branches, resulting in a one official version when the user finishes editing the document. These pseudoversions will be memorized in a new table, similar to the document table or the recycle bin. Along with introducing pseudoversions, several behaviors should be changed, improving the user experience. For instance: - In all editors, "Save & Continue" should become "Save draft" and should create pseudoversions that can be canceled, and "Save and View" should become simply "Save" (these texts are also much easier to understand by the user). - In class editing, properties are added in the pseudoversion, and these changes can be canceled when the user presses the "Cancel" button. (canceling property addition is not possible ATM, unless the document is reverted). - In the object editor, objects can be added in the pseudoversion, and all changes can be saved at once. These changes are pretty substantial, from the data management and user experience point of view, but I believe it is worth making the step. Please tell me what you think. Should we try to get this done before 2.0? -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/