Hi, On 10/27/07, Aidan Morgan <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi guys,

This is my first post, so I am sorry if I am posting it to the wrong email list.

This is the right list if you intend to share with the community the resulting applications, but the users list would have been better.

I am currently working on a PhD at the University of Western Australia and am interested in using a Wiki to manage all of my references/publications. I have used Confluence before, however I have decided to switch to XWiki because it's open source and I can make the changes I want (and contribute them back to the group).

For a bit of background I am currently a Senior Software Engineer for a software company in Perth Western Australia, and I have had experience using Hibernate, Velocity, Struts and some JEE architectural work.

What I plan to do is build two applications/plugins that will run inside XWiki with some interaction between them. I want to create a Class and associated editors for storing/retrieving all of my citations (in BibTeX format). Once I have done that I would also like to create an editor that allows me to create papers in LaTeX format and render them using the LaTeX -> XHTML converter, allowing me to work on my papers from home, work or uni.

To get started I have a few questions, I will start with just the one and I expect to be asking more as time goes on :-)

1. I have used the FAQ tutorial to create a new "Class" for rendering the FAQ pages however my BibTeX pages need a bit more structure than one class. Basically I expect two objects to be persisted in the database, a BibTeX header and an object that represents the type (in a map I assume). Each entry type (paper, confrence proceeding, book, URL etc.) has different fields that are mandatory and are able to be set. I imagine I would have a simple Interface called BibTexData that is associated with a BibTexEntry, and put the correct version in depending on what it is. It is feasable that I want to change the "type" after the page is created (as most decent BibTeX database applications allow me to do). How do I design this using the class editor wizard, or am I better off creating this structure manually in the hibernate mappings and code?

First of all, all objects are persisted in the database, but not as you usually expect from a object2relational mapping. You should not try to change the mapping files or alter the database structure in any way. XWiki allows defining custom mappings for XObjects, but that is only for special needs. The easiest way to handle the differences in the BibTeX entry types is to put all the possible fields in one XClass, and filter the needed properties in the display sheet. This will require more if-else programming in the sheet and BibTeX-processing code, but will save you of a lot of trouble. To illustrate how this would work, you will have to manually create the sheet, or to edit the sheet after creating it using the class wizard, and write stuff like: #if($obj.type == "book" || $obj.type == "inproceedings") $doc.display("publisher", $obj) #end The second way would be to create one common class, BibType, with only one field, "type", and one class for each bibtex entry type. A document would contain one BibType object, and one object of the other classes, like BibBook, and the sheet would be generic, displaying all the fields of the other object, something like: #set($bibtypeobj = $doc.getObject("XWiki.BibType")) #set($bibtype = $bibtypeobj.getProperty('type').value) #set($obj = $doc.getObject("XWiki.Bib${bibtype}")) #set($class = $obj.xWikiClass) ## the same code as in skins/albatross/editobject.vm for displaying the properties Now, if you want to change the object type, you would have to write a velocity template that is able to create a new object, clone the common fields from the existing object, add it to the document and remove the old object. The second way is better at the level of semantics and data organization, but requires more programming and more advanced programming. Once you manage to create this application, it would be nice if you export it and upload on the xwiki.org code zone. For the second part, LaTeX to HTML, the way I see things you should: 1. Create a plugin that uses an external tool for the conversion, using a shell command, for example 2. Write a velocity template (latex2html.vm) that calls the plugin, something like $xwiki.getPlugin('latex2html').convert($doc.getContent) 3. Put somewhere in the page a link to $doc.getURL("view", "xpage=latex2html"), for example in the Export section of the menu. Good luck! Sergiu -- http://purl.org/net/sergiu