Re: [xwiki-devs] [GSoC] XEclipse RESTification

Hi Jun, Looking better and better :) Here are some extra pointers based on your video: 1) Instead of 'Edit' or 'Reply To Comment' buttons in the comment editor, use the standard Save command for an editor and mark the editor window as dirty when it needs saving. Warn the user of an unsaved/modified editor when trying to close it, etc. 1.1) On the same note, I notice that the RCP that you are running does not have the button toolbar. Maybe we should have some common sense buttons like save/save As, undo, cut/copy/paste and maybe some other too. 2) When adding/removing an attachment/comment/page/etc., the general rule should be to refresh as little as possible. So you should refresh just the Attachments/Comments section of the current page and not all the current page's sections (or even worst, the whole navigator). Even better, you could (based on the internal notifications) just add(or remove) the new elements to the UI instead of refreshing everything. All of this minimizes the trafic, reduces waiting time, does not confuse the user and generally helps performance :) Remember that this is a general good practice, but if you have time issues, you could have the first versions just refreshing small sections instead of doing individual manipulations. 3) Just like you did for comments or annotations by displaying the author (first property), you can do the same for general objects, when grouped under their class name. You can just show "[objectNumber] firstPropertyValue". The XWiki object editor treats things a bit more customized [1], preferring the first property matching the pattern "*name*" or "*title*", if not, the first String property and, if that fails too, the first non-TextArea property. (note: the current implementation is a bit buggy and takes the last String or non-TextArea property instead. See [2] for the correct version.) On the other hand, all this "nice" information (first property value) can cause a heavy load on the server since it involves retrieving every single object and getting it's property value. In the object editor, all this info is easily obtained by a database query, but in REST we have to do a lot of queries to get the same data. So if we have 1000 comments on a page or 1000 objects of a specific class, if we try to list them, we will make 1001 requests instead of just 1. Even if this is asynchronous and the user can do something else while the objects are retrieved, the benefit might not be worth it. The debate here is whether to display the first property value for everything like comments, annotations and generic objects (for a better user experience in low-page-load conditions) or for nothing at all (because of the performance overkill). 4) You might want 'Download Attachment' and 'Update Attachment' to be the first actions for an attachment and 'Delete' to be the last. Otherwise, you risk pressing delete unwillingly. It is a general best practice to put destructive actions towards the end of the actions list and main/most used actions towards the top. 5) Minor note: Highlighted Text property of XWikiComments class is not used AFAIK. It's ok to leave it there in case we start using it, but just so you know, I don`t know any place where it is actually used. Maybe it's a step towards merging annotations with comments, but that's another topic of discussion :) Thanks, Eduard ----------- References: [1] https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform/blob/master/xwiki-platform-core/xwi… [2] https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform/pull/15/files On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 10:04 AM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote: