Re: [xwiki-devs] [Discussion] Merge Annotations with Comments

The problems that I am facing now are related to 2 things: = Approach 1 = If you use only XWiki.XWikiComments (extended with annotation fileds as the pull request is now), you lose the Annotation feature's capability to specify a different AnnotationClass. This means that, if you want to customize the annotation, you need to extend the XWikiComments class directly, and nothing else. This might break existing clients that have provided their own annotation class and will not display their annotations. Writing a migrator for that would imply looking at the configured annotation class that they have provided, update XWikiComments class with the new fields that might be present in that annotation class and convert the annotation objects to use the updated XWikiComments class instead. Would that be enough? This solution will ensure that both "annotation" and "comment" IDs are in the same namespace and are unique. This also ensures that: - the replyTo field points to a proper object ID of class XWikiComments - the html IDs are unique in the page so that the permalinks and anchors for jumping to the annotation and back to the comments tab work - the comments are naturally sorted by ID General downside of solution 1: you lose the ability to change the annotation backend, since you just look at XWiki objects in the page. = Approach 2 = The merging solution has a few problems of it's own: a) The annotation service returns java object Annotations, while the commentsinline.vm works with XWiki API objects. To avoid this problem, we can just do what the old AnnotationsTab did, and that is to directly get the XWiki objects stored in the page using the class configured in the annotations config. Downside: you lose the ability to change the annotation backend, since you just look at XWiki objects in the page. b) Merging things means that we keep both the comments and annotations as separate entities. This means that each have their own ID namespace, causing collisions for the replyTo and permalink features. To avoid this, we would have to do some not-so-nice tricks and mark annotations ID (like "annotation1") so that they are separated from regular comments IDs (when used in the replyTo field). b.1) One solution would be to change the replyTo field's type from Number to String so that we can store this separation. Downside1: This still requires a migration. Downside2: because this means to use the solution for a), we still loose the ability to change the annotation backend. b.2)The other solution would be to use the annotation service API when getting the list of annotations and make a convention when an annotation is created so that it's numeric ID starts from a very large number (like 1.000.000 or more). Downside: Same as problem a): we have to work with 2 types and lots of "IF statements" when processing the comments. Ex: One type has comment.number (for comments), while the other one has comment.id (for annotations). Same thing for dates: comment.getProperty('date').value vs comment.date. General downside of solution2: Since they are merged and no longer naturally sorted by object ID, the comments and annotations also need to be sorted by date. = Conclusion= As I look more into the problem, it does seem that the first approach is the best, having the least number of compromises and doing a better job at semantically merging the two concepts into one. Do you agree? Thanks for your feedback, Eduard On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 11:43 AM, Jerome Velociter <jerome(a)winesquare.net>wrote;wrote: