22 Feb
2019
22 Feb
'19
10:31 p.m.
Hi devs,
Because of tomcat and because tomcat is by far the most used container for xwiki and
because we also bundle tomcat in the debian and docker dsitributions, I think we should
disallow / and \ in page names by default. It's causing too much trouble for users. We
keep having users posting problems and for one user who post a problem there are 100 who
don't.
The latest one:
https://forum.xwiki.org/t/please-help-broken-link-routing-cannot-open-page-…
+1 for me for the stripping of slashes. Even if configured properly
there is a problem with tomcat: if you create a page e.g. in the Sandbox
with a title of "Page A / B", this creates a page with the reference
"Sandbox.Page A . B.WebHome", and you get an "empty" intermediate
space.
As users mostly see titles in the current XWiki version, it should not
matter to them what happens to the page name.
Implementation idea:
* Offer an extension point in the create page UI to allow plugging some cleaning
algorithm
* Provide the \ and / cleaning algorithm by default
* Handle backward compat. Find ways to not break existing users who are having / and \ in
page names. For example we could imagine a property in xwiki.properties that we would set
to point to the hint of the / and \ cleaner component. Thus existing users would need to
voluntarily upgrade their xwiki.properties to have it if they want it. We would need to
provide some script to convert existing pages with / and \ too probably.
WDYT?
About backwards compatibility, I do not get the point. What will break
for users who have already existing pages?
As long as the cleaning algorithm only runs on newly created pages there
should not be any bw/compat problem.
If they really want no cleaning, we can provide them with a property
which contains the characters to be scrapped from the name with a
default value of '/\', and if they do not want this, they can set this
property to an empty value.
Or what am I missing here?
Best,
Clemens
Thanks
-Vincent
P.S. As a side note, when using MySQL creating spaces with a trailing
whitespace seem to cause some odd problems, too. I have seen at least
one occurrence of an entry in the xwikispaces with no corresponding
entries in xwikidoc. This causes an entry in the navigation tree which
leads to a non-existing page and no good way to get rid of it from a
users point of view. I have not figured out how to reproduce the
problem, unfortunately.
(For the issue with trailing spaces try "select 'x' = 'x ',
'x' like 'x
'; " and read https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/char.html )