6 Jun
2015
6 Jun
'15
2:38 p.m.
On 6 Jun 2015 at 14:20:46, vincent(a)massol.net
(vincent@massol.net(mailto:vincent@massol.net)) wrote:
A.WebHome is too complex which is exactly why Guillaume is sending this proposal about
Nested Documents. The idea is that the doc will be seen as “A" for the user (and
implemented technically as A.WebHome till we update the DB to remove the “space” field,
which would make the impl much simpler).
I’d say mostly because we need to transport the full location in the Doc Reference, which
allows us to do lots of things:
- display it in the URL
- no need to recompute the breadcrumb every time we need to display the hierarchy (which
is the case now and it doesn’t scale)
- ability in the future to have several references for a single doc
- consistency: there’s no reason that the space would be in the reference but not the
parent… ATM we have two concurrent concepts which makes it impossible for users to
understand the difference between Spaces and child/parent relationships.
Thanks
-Vincent
Hi Marius,
On 4 Jun 2015 at 18:16:03, Marius Dumitru Florea
(mariusdumitru.florea@xwiki.com(mailto:mariusdumitru.florea@xwiki.com)) wrote:
Yes it’s the same thing from a User POV. One difference is that we want a reference to
contain the full path of a doc. Right now you’d need to transport the (Doc Reference + the
full Breadcrumb) to represent the same thing.
But I agree that it’s the same concept, it’s just a different implementation. That’s why
I’m proposing to drop the parent/child fields as we have them now since it’s just
duplicating the concepts (and it’s confusing for users), and to reimplement the Breadcrumb
UI using Doc References.
Note that having the full location in the reference also allows to have URLs containing
the full path which is interesting (for knowing where you are by looking at the URL:
http://.../view/Space.Page1, http://.../view/Space.Page2 doesn’t indicate anything about
the relationship between Page1 and Page2 when Page1 could the parent of Page2). It’s also
interesting for SEO.
Yes. They call it Path (we call it a Document Reference).
Also note the idea of "An Entity can be a pointer to another Entity (e.g of use case:
rename, aliases)” from that doc. This should be not to hard to implement using our current
model by adding a Type field in the DB. But it’s a breaking change that would require 8.x
(because current apps doing queries on the doc table would get the “pointer” Types which
should be excluded, unless we add a filter to search*() APIs + the Query API).
Thanks
-Vincent
On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 5:10 PM, Guillaume
"Louis-Marie" Delhumeau
wrote:
I agree with Guillaume here. We’ve seen it on this list but more importantly Caty has
done some recorded usability sessions and if I remember correctly it was clearly showing
the problem. And users don’t understand that Spaces are like Folders which is why we also
had this discussion on the list at one point about renaming them as Folder.
In any case, removing one concept can only be simpler IMO. I find it simpler to have 2
concepts (Wiki, Pages: A wiki is a set of pages) instead of 3 (Wiki, Spaces, Pages: a wiki
is a set of spaces, which each one containing pages).
Hello XWiki committers.
Vincent have proposed the development of nested spaces for 7.2 and some of
us have already agreed. But the concept of nested spaces introduces a
problem that Denis have mentioned during some internal discussions at XWiki
SAS, and that I am going to report here.
From a UI perspective, differentiating pages `A.B.C.WebHome` and `A.B.C`
could become very difficult.
Moreover, we know that a lot of users do not
understand the notion of
spaces, and they are lost when you look at them during usability sessions.
I'm not sure about this statement. My feeling is that many users
understand spaces as "folders" (they make the analogy with the file
system). Moreover, whenever we display a space in the XWiki UI we use
the folder icon, so we encourage the users to make this analogy. The
situation is even worse if you consider the notion of parent/child
documents, which is completely unrelated to the actual hierarchy. It
creates confusion!
To fix these problems, we propose to introduce
the notion of "nested
documents", i.e. the ability to create documents inside documents.
What's the difference at a *conceptual* level between the notion of
parent/child we have right now and the notion of nested documents you
propose? I don't see it. You even use "parent" and
"child" words below
to explain the "nested" notion. The word "nested" sounds very
technical to me. I don't know about French, but in my native language
the translation for "nested" is not a commonly used word, unlike
parent and child. It seems easier to me to explan to a user that a
document can have a parent document and some child documents (the
parent / child relationship) then to explain them that a document can
be "nested" inside another document and can "nest" other documents
too.
I don’t think GL has suggested to use the word Nested anywhere in the UI… It’s just a
word we use internally to describe the feature. I’m fine to continue using the terminology
Parent and Children.
Say
differently, if a page `A.B.C` exists, nothing should stop the user to
create the document `A.B.C.D`.
You mentioned JCR on the next paragraph. Are JCR nodes identified by
the position (path) in the tree? I think we should make a distinction
between the way we identify a document and the way we access that
document.
This means using unique ids for identifying docs (and this is what we already have in the
DB except the Id is based on its path in the DB but this could be changed and this is our
problem). Of course in the UI we should never display these ids.
I like the fact that currently when you change
the parent of
a document the document identifier (reference) stays the same.
It’s not fully true. When we rename a doc the doc id is modified.
What would be interesting would be the ability to have several Document References for a
given doc (with one being the default probably). This is something I’ve been interested in
implementing for a long time but it would probably require some model changes and it’s not
for XWiki 7.x IMO. We could discuss it when we talk about XWiki 8.x and the new model in
general. See also http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/XWikiModel20 (on that page
I had put: “Ability to have multiple references pointing to the same entity” and yes this
is also supported by the JCR API). In JCR[1], there is only one concept: the
"node". A node can have a
content, and a list of child nodes. In XWiki, documents could become a kind
of nodes, and we do not need spaces anymore.
If we don't have space anymore, we could ask ourselves: "How the rights
will be propagated to the children documents? How do we distinguish rights
applied to the documents and the rights applied to the children?"
I think the easiest solution is to inherit the rights from the parent to
the children, unless an object prevent it. We already have this kind of
mechanism with XWikiRights and XWikiGlobalRights. XWikiRights would be
applied for the current document, and XWikiGlobalRights for the document and
its children.
But changing the XWiki model is a lot of work, that we don't have time to
achieve for 7.2. So we propose to make it step by step.
The first step is to change the UI to hide the notion of space to the
users. Concretely, each time a user wants to create a page called `A`, we
actually create the document `A.WebHome`. So any child of this page would
be created in the `A` space, like `A.Child`. But this child would be in a
space too, so it would be `A.Child.WebHome` actually.
I find this 'A.WebHome' thing too complex. Look at the document
hierarchy tree
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Document+Tree+Macro#HD…
. We can hide the spaces already by relying on the parent / child
relationship. Then,
when we display the `A.WebHome` page, we remove all mentions to the
`WebHome` name. In the UI, it will just be presented as the document `A`.
This is a good point, knowing the fact that the term `WebHome` have no
sense for the user, neither in English or in other languages.
Again, these changes are only for the UI. For the applications, it is the
developer's job to decide if the app will create documents like
`Document.WebHome` or basic documents just as before.
The question of what to do with AWM comes up. When a user creates an entry,
should it be a new-kind-of-document (`AppSpace.Entry.WebHome`) or an
old-kind-of-document (`AppSpace.Entry`)? The first option is good for
consistency and for the new possibilities it offers, but the second is
better for retro-compatibility. And the question will be the same for all
existing applications that create pages. I believe we should answer these
questions on a case-by-case basis and deserve their own mail threads.
This proposal also implies to change some macros, like the {{space}} one,
and some panels. But I believe there is no blocking-point there.
Finally, after these steps are accomplished in 7.2 and polished until the
end of the 7.x cycle, we will refactor the XWiki model (something we dream
about for years).
To sum up, the idea we propose is:
On the short run:
- Hide the notion of space in the UI.
- Hide the `WebHome` name in the UI.
- When a user creates a page from the UI, it actually creates a space with
a WebHome.
- Remove the current parent/child mechanism which is outdated (and
confusing) compared to the new hierarchy.
On the long run:
- Remove the notion of space in the model, and replace it by "nested
documents".
- Tune the rights system to inherit rights from parents to children.
Of course, we can discuss the technical details and the implementation
strategies. But for now, we need to know if you accept the general idea
(nested documents).
So, I hope you will like this proposal, and here
is my +1.
I'm not convinced. I don't see why we should drop the parent/child
relationship in order to introduce something similar but more complex. Thanks,
Marius
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Guillaume D.
>
>
>
> [1] JCR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_repository_API_for_Java
>
>
>
>
> --
> Guillaume Delhumeau (gdelhumeau(a)xwiki.com)