3 Oct
2011
3 Oct
'11
6:15 p.m.
Hi Marius,
Disclaimer: I really haven't had the time to think about this so my comments below are
based after thinking about it for 10 minutes only. IMO this requires some more
brainstorming/thinking.
On Oct 3, 2011, at 5:33 PM, Marius Dumitru Florea wrote:
Hi devs,
For the upcoming Application Within Minutes I need to enhance the
XWiki platform with the ability to generate the page name
automatically when creating a new wiki page. For some applications it
doesn't make sense to have two creation steps: (1) specify the wiki
page name (i.e. the location) and then (2) edit the new wiki page with
the specified name. Let me give you two examples:
* It would be cool to be able to create a new blog post in a single
step. The blog post name could be generated from the blog post title
specified in the edit form.
* An application that manages holiday requests doesn't need meaningful
page names (i.e. free text, like a blog post would have) but something
like Request_XYZ, where XYZ is a unique counter/identifier.
These applications should be able to create new wiki pages with
automatically generated names without writing their custom create
forms.
Since 3.2RC1 was planed for today and these changes are in the 3.2
roadmap, here's a proposal that I think I can implement quickly and
safely:
(1) Introduce two new components:
// Used to generate a document name that doesn't have to be unique
(e.g. by cleaning the document title).
DocumentReferenceGenerator#generate(DocumentModelBridge):DocumentReference
// Used to make a document name unique (by suffixing an unique
counter/identifier)
DocumentReferenceDifferentiator#differentiate(DocumentReference):DocumentReference
I don't see the need for 2 components. I do see the need for one component:
DocumentReferenceGenerator#generate(String prefix)
Then you could have one implementation of it that that takes the prefix and appends a
number to make it unique.
Now for using the title as the reference name, we don't need anything:
new DocumentReference(wiki, space, doc.getTitle());
(2) Modify editinline.vm to store
"documentReferenceGenerator" and
"documentReferenceDifferentiator" request parameters in two hidden
input fields so that they are passed to the save action. Obviously,
these are component hints.
(3) Modify editactions.vm to replace "Save & View" + "Save &
Continue"
with "Create" when "documentReferenceGenerator" or
"documentReferenceDifferentiator" (or both) request parameters are
set.
I don't see how what use case (3) solves. Can you explain?
(4) Modify SaveAction to take into account these two
request
parameters (only if they are specified). Something along these lines:
generateDocumentReference(doc)
synchronize(lock) {
doc.copyDocument(differentiate(generatedDocumentReference)).save();
}
I'm not sure where to place the two components from (1) though. WDYT?
The component I mentioned above could go in xwiki-platform-model.
<general remarks>
Now I'm not very comfortable with hacking the default vm files to add more
"if" in the code to support even more parameters.
Why not use the new sheet system you've started putting in place to specify a specific
vm to use?
More generally I'd like that we think about removing big spaghettis code for vm and be
able to have more vms and that we can choose which vm to use where.
Also, as usual, I'd like to that someone who wants to build on the xwiki dev platform
be able to not use this if he doesn't need to (hence my comment above about being able
to selectively choose what behavior to have/use instead of having lots of "if"s
in vm files. Especially since this new behavior doesn't seem to be good for the
majority of use cases but only for some.
Said differently use an Object-oriented approach or a component-based approach instead of
a big-ball-of-mud approach ;)
</general remarks>
Note that as always, I'd prefer if we do this:
- discuss how we would like it to be in the near future
- then only discuss how to reach that based on constraints (release contraint, etc) and
see how many steps we need to get there
Thanks
-Vincent