On Jul 25, 2007, at 7:10 AM, Asiri Rathnayake wrote:
Hi Vincent,
On 7/25/07, Vincent Massol <
vincent@massol.net> wrote: On Jul 24, 2007, at 9:03 PM, Asiri Rathnayake wrote:
Hi Sergiu,
On 7/25/07, Sergiu Dumitriu <
sergiu.dumitriu@gmail.com> wrote: On 7/24/07, Asiri Rathnayake <
asiri.rathnayake@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> We were silent for few days due to mid-semester work load (still have some
> unfinished business). Anyway, I have added the removeSpace RPC to xwiki
> back-end. But now i'm having few doubts about it. The remove space RPC works
> by retrieving all the page names under the given space and deleting them
> individually. But following complications may happen when using this RPC,
>
> 1. If the user does not have enough privileges to delete some of the pages
> within that space, an exception will be thrown half-way down. Now the RPC
> invoker does not know which pages were removed and which were not. (Thus, he
> is out of sync with the wiki)
>
> 2. If instead we chose to remove page by page from the client - Xeclipse
> (say), we don't have this problem , and we could even display a progress
> bar. (to indicate that pages are being deleted).
>
> Since the XML RPC API requires the removeSpace() RPC, we must indeed add it.
> But wouldn't it be better if we do not use this RPC within Xeclipse (due to
> reasons mentioned above) ?
>
> Or, is there a better way to implement removeSpace() RPC ? (like checking
> privileges before doing anything ?) ) (+ How ? )
From the user PoV, it is better to have a feedback as documents are
deleted. This means that the client should make requests one by one.
From a developer PoV, this means a lot more traffic and a lot more
time, as each request creates a new connection, a new context
initialization, new objects, etc.
Agreed.
Still, if there's an error while deleting documents, the server method
should not be aborted, but should keep a list of failed documents.
Now, I don't know what to do with this list. Should the method return
a List, and if it is empty then everything was OK? Or should we simply
return true/false, and make another call to see what documents are
left in the space, if the result was "false"?
These are the types of complications that i came across. Although we can
come up with some workaround like making a second call to sync the client
with server, we can avoid all that trouble by simply deleting page by page. But
again that is little bit (?) more over-head than a single RPC.
I prefer deleting page by page since that would make our life easy by not having
to worry about complex state management on the client (like making a second RPC
and refreshing the whole object model on the client so that it corresponds to server).
You need a refresh button anyway as changes can happen on the server. Actually I think the strategy should be:
- try an action
- in case of error, refresh and try again
- if it doesn't work, report it
I think this is good. Few urgent questions then,
Actually I think it's not so good. It's too dangerous. Also we shouldn't delete a space if someone has added a page to it. I prefer the following approach:
* Before any modification (delete, edit, rename, etc) we first do a refresh and check if there has been no modification. If there has been we cancel the action and ask the user to review the changes before doing anything.
For example for the remove Space this means:
- check if any page was modified since last refresh
- check if any page was removed or added since last refresh
- if so, tell what was changed to the user and ask him to review the changes before hitting the delete button again
- refresh the workspace with the changes
The only tricky part is when the user has modified content locally and it has also been modified remotely. Then we need to open a page showing a diff between the two versions (using Eclipse diff/merge components) and asking the user to do the merge.
1. Shall we first finish the work for Xeclipse m1 and then later look into "refresh" work or do we need this mechanism (as it applies globally) before doing anything else ? I prefer the first approach :)
You need to release 1.0M1 first. This is the priority.
2. How can i check whether a certain RPC invocation have admin rights ? (A simple code sample would be greate!!!)
You don't check, you simply know it... :)
Meaning if the user wants to remove a space you first check if he has admin rights (do we have an API for this? If not we should probably add it) and if so calls the removeSpace method.
Thanks
-Vincent
WDYT?
The alternative (which is slightly longer but maybe longer) would be:
- refresh
- try action
- report if error
Thanks
-Vincent