2 May
2007
2 May
'07
8:52 a.m.
On May 1, 2007, at 3:22 PM, Ludovic Dubost wrote:
I have the need to show a better diff page for a page containing an
object.
Yes I agree we really need this. Personally I'd like to set up the
email plugin on xwiki.org and send the diff of the modifications to
the dev list whenever someone makes a change.
Since there is no generic diff for objects, I'd
like to write a
Diff plugin allowing to make a nice diff of any two strings passed.
Are you talking about Object diffs or String diffs here? Or do you
mean XML diff?
I think we have 2 options:
- Diff of Objects: Difference getDifferences(Object o1, Object o2). I
guess the diff could then be the difference of object fields. This
would need to be implemented for each XWiki Object.
- XML difference. This is the XML representation of XWiki Objects. I
don't think there are any good/simple XML diff frameworks so we would
also need to implement that.
I think it's better to do an Object diff as otherwise the xml diff
would need to be transformed to be presented to the user and this
will require extra parsing. Better to operate on Object as we already
have them in our java code.
At the same time I'd like to start a refactoring
of the current
diff in the same plugin.
Currently I see the following APIs:
DiffPlugin
// returns a list of org.suigeneris.jrcs.diff.Delta (which
representd differences)
getLineDiffAsList(String content1, String content2)
// returns a list of org.suigeneris.jrcs.diff.Delta (which
representd differences)
getWordDiffAsList(String content1, String content2)
// returns an HTML view of differences
getLineDiffAsList(String content1, String content2)
// returns an HTML view of differences
getWordDiffAsList(String content1, String content2)
// returns an Text view of differences
getLineDiffAsList(String content1, String content2)
// returns an Text view of differences
getWordDiffAsList(String content1, String content2)
I don't understand. I would have used something like:
List<Difference> getDifferences(XWikiDocument, XWikiDocument)
List<Difference> getDifferences(XObject, XObject)
List<Difference> getDifferences(String, String)
Also, I think it's critical that in an API we should only use our own
classes/interfaces and no external ones, so I think we should have
our own Difference class and not use JRCS'. It could possibly wrap it
if necessary.
Other APIs could be a function to get a complete diff
of an
XWikiDocument (includes objects, attachements), however the
implementation itself should probably reside in an velocity template.
The implementation of a document difference should in the plugin I
think. The plugin should only do backend stuff though and return a
list of named differences. I agree it would be up to the vm files to
do the presentation of it (be if for the wiki, for an email to be
sent, etc).
There is an interesting discussion to have about how
the
representation of the Text and HTML views should be.
Yes, that's hard. I'd like to see a wiki markup diff in addition to
the current HTML diff we have as I find our current diff not very
good. I think we need both.
Any ideas ?
Another question is wether it is a good idea to put this as a
plugin. I think yes since it could be use for other things than the
wiki content.
A plugin would be good I think as it means the implementation becomes
pluggable. In the future it would be transformed into a component but
that's the same idea.
Thanks
-Vincent