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,

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 :)

2.  How can i check whether a certain RPC invocation have admin rights ? (A simple code sample would be greate!!!)

WDYT?

The alternative (which is slightly longer but maybe longer) would be:

- refresh

- try action

- report if error

Thanks

-Vincent