15 Oct
2016
15 Oct
'16
5:37 p.m.
On 15 Oct 2016, at 13:30, Eduard Moraru
<enygma2002(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 8:18 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
I would say that an application would need both and Entry Point (i.e.
homepage)
I’d say this is optional. It would a pain to always mandate this. For example the LDAP
Application only provides an Admin UI (it only helps to configure LDAP).
So for me the entry point is another concept: it’s a link to a place where the user should
go to use the app. It can be pointing either to the app’s home page if there’s one, or the
app’s Admin UI page.
The goal of this thread is not to talk about home pages or Admin sections of extensions.
It’s about discoverability and making it easy for users to start using any extension that
is installed through the EM UI.
Thanks
-Vincent
On 14 Oct 2016, at 19:03, Thomas Mortagne
<thomas.mortagne(a)xwiki.com>
wrote:
This does not make any sense at general Extension level.
Could be custom metadata that apply to XAR extensions. Since that only
make sense for XAR extensions I would prefer to have this be
implemented as a xobject as usual.
Yes, it could be implemented as a UIXP/XObject of the Extension UI.
For me this is already the job of the uix we use
for application panel
so I don't really see the point of adding something else.
It’s not enough at all. That was my main point and explanation. Apparently
I failed to explain the problem correctly.
I’ll give more details:
* You install a XAR extension that provides a ConfigurableClass (but you
don’t know that as a user)
but also an optional Configuration section (i.e.
administration
section defined by either a ConfigurableClass entry or even something
custom).
Thanks,
Eduard
> * After you’ve installed that extension, as a user, you don’t know what to
> do. You need to go read the doc for the app to understand where you need to
> go to start using it.
>
> So I’m really convinced we need something better than what we have now.
>
> Now after we move the Applications UIXP to the xwiki-platform-applications
> module, we could add an “entrypoint’ property in the UIXP but that would
> mean that the Extension Manager UI module would depend on
> xwiki-platform-applications. We would need to decide if it’s ok. I think it
> is since it can be considered as an application descriptor and I don’t see
> a problem of having the EM UI module know about application descriptors.
>
> WDYT?
>
> Thanks
> Vincent
>
>> On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 4:10 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net>
> wrote:
>>> Hi devs,
>>>
>>> Problem
>>> =======
>>>
>>> We have 2 issues right now when installing an extension in XWiki:
>>>
>>> 1) It’s not clear where is the entry point of that extension.
>>> - Example1: an app that is only for admins and only has a
> ConfigurableClass
>>> - Example2: an app that provides a macro and doesn’t have a UI
>>>
>>> 2) Even when an extension registers itself in the Applications Panel,
> the user still need to refresh the page or navigate away to see it.
>>>
>>> Proposal
>>> ========
>>>
>>> * Introduce the concept of Entry point (a.k.a home page) in Extension
> metadata
>>> * Have the EM UI display the extension’s entry point (when there’s one)
> after having installed the extension so that the user can click on it and
> be taken to the home page of the extension.
>>>
>>> This would make extensions more discoverable IMO.
>>>
>>> Implementation Details
>>> ==================
>>>
>>> * Some maven extension metadata properties in pom.xml
>>>
>>> * A format to represent an entry point. It shouldn’t be a full URL
> since that needs to be computed at runtime. Basically it should contain:
>>> ** The document reference
>>> ** The action to use (view, admin, etc) - optional, should default to
> “view"
>>> ** The query string to use - optional, should default to an empty query
> string
>>>
>>> This corresponds to the notion of ResourceReference
> (EntityResourceReference to be precise). However we don’t have any textual
> representation of it ATM.
>>>
>>> WDYT? Good idea? Bad idea?
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> -Vincent