[xwiki-devs] [Discussion] Wiki Macro Bridge

Hello Devs, This is about implementing support for creating rendering macros by editing wiki pages! The corresponding JIRA issue is http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-3213. Introduction ------------ There are two main xwiki classes involved: XWiki.WikiMacro & XWiki.WikiMacroParameter. Fields of these classes are as below: XWiki.WikiMacro | |-> name (Name of the macro) | |-> description (Short description about the macro - for display purposes) | |-> content (Macro content, this is what will be executed when the macro is invoked, can be any xwiki/2.0 content) XWiki.WikiMacroParameter | |-> name (Name of the parameter) | |-> macro (Name of the macro to which this parameter applies to) | |-> description (Description of this macro parameter - for display purposes) | |-> mandatory (boolean value indicating if this parameter is mandatory) So the basic idea is, when a user saves (or updates) a page containing an Object of XWiki.WikiMacro type, we will dynamically register (or re-register) a macro as defined by that object. Question: 1. What about macro name conflicts? Should we ask macro name to be unique? (This can be done if we introduce a document sheet and a template for creating macros) Implementation steps -------------------- 1. The original idea was to create XWiki.WikiMacro & XWiki.WikiMacroParameter classes upon XE startup (if those classes are not present). But I would like to start a little different here, we create xwiki-application-wikimacro application to host these two documents and later remove this app and add the initialization code. This will allow me to focus on other more important tasks upfront and meanwhile i can make any changes easily to these wiki pages if they are kept inside an application. 2. Document update / save event listening & Macro registration can be implemented using the ObservationManager and dynamic component registration mechanisms. - Currently ObservationManager can only send general document save / update events. We can either use these events and filter only those we are interested (ones where an XWiki.WikiMacro object is saved / updated) OR we can introduce a new event like ObjectChangedEvent (which would be constructed given a class name) that is fired by xwiki-core appropriately. - This document event listening & dynamic macro component registration code will be put inside xwiki-rendering/xwiki-rendering-macro-wikibridge 3. Finally DefaultMacroManager needs to be updated so that it listens to ComponentManager events and filters out those events corresponding to Macro component registrations and updates the internal macro cache. So, above is the approach I have in mind for implementing the wiki-macro bridge. If you have any comments, please let me know. Thanks. - Asiri