Re: [xwiki-devs] Improving the XWiki Development environment for traditional Java/JS Developers

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 10:46 AM, Paul Libbrecht <paul(a)hoplahup.net> wrote: Not sure to understand what you mean here. Do you want to have a directory structure inside the attachments directory or you want your attachments to be everywhere in your filesystem (so outside the XWikiFS structure?) Both are feasible, the second using an additional file containing all the references. No strong opinion here. I just went this way to reduce the depth of the directory tree. The problem here is that something must be fixed. What is surely needed is 1) A file containing page metadata 2) A file containing class metadata 3) Several files containing object metadata 4) Several files containing referenced class metadata None of them are really mandatory, but we need a way to precisely identify them if they exist. For 1 and 2 the extension is not really important as long as we use a well defined file name. For 3 extension is important because it's the way for "finding" what contains object metadata in a directory that might contain also other stuff (see next comment) Same for 4. Of course we might go the way of a completely free layout where you define the an "index" file in the root directory and specify where things are. This could complexify the code a bit and would also introduce another level of indirection that could also make things less understandable for somebody using this system for authoring wiki pages. It's already there. You can externalize whatever you want :) If in your YAML files you write "-> filename" then the value of the field will be read from filename. In this way you can externalize every textarea-field to whatever file you want. I did this in the comment object. The XWO map ( https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs/blob/master/src/test/resources/Main.… ) has a reference saying that the comment field will be found in the XWiki.XWikiComments-0/comment.txt file. And in that file ( https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs/blob/master/src/test/resources/Main.… ) you have the actual value. XWiki.XWikiComments-0/comment.txt is completely arbirtary. You can use whatever file name/file path you want giving you the power of deciding your own directory layout for externalized values. And this is possible in every XWD, XWC, XWO file which gives you great flexibility in organizing stuff on top of a light rigid structure. I think it's a good compromise. I chose YAML because it's the less verbose, intuitive and simple to handle syntax for describing maps. You can see it in the example files: no extra {}, no extra "", no extra commas, etc. It was the simplest thing for writing plain key-value files without typing extra characters. You might say that I could have used plain properties file or a simple "key: value" format using String.split for getting the actual key,value. True, but there is a case where this is not enough. Class files has the property value that is a nested map :) We don't need to go deeper but even this could have complicated the code a bit so I went to the YAML route. Thanks, Fabio