[Chandler-dev] It's 'about' time to deal with redirections...

[Brian Kirsch]

Hi Bryan,
There has been much talk over the .7 release of removing displayName  
all together.

The ambigious nature of the displayName makes it less than ideal for  
localization.

Since all items have a displayName attribute, it becomes difficult to  
determine which displayNames appear in the UI and thus need translation.

John Anderson was looking in to removing all displayNames from the  
Chandler code base
at one point.

The proposal was to use an alternate attribute such as title for  
localized displayable values.

I have been off working on Mail and have not given the displayName  
issue much thought as of late.

Perhaps now is a good time to re-raise the discussion.

-Brian

On Oct 31, 2006, at 2:16 PM, Bryan Stearns wrote:

> The time has come to deal with a couple of issues around attribute  
> redirection:
>
> - We need to index 'who' and 'about' attributes for the dashboard,  
> but (a) the repository can't index an attribute that's the _source_  
> of a redirection (the index gets out-of-date really quickly,  
> leading to several of my alpha5 bugs), and (b) for 'who', a static  
> redirection isn't good enough because the 'who' value needs to be  
> determined on a per-item (not per-subclass or per-annotation) basis.
>
> - A related issue is that we're trying to get rid of the dependence  
> on the repository's generic 'displayName' mechanism on Item;  
> currently, 'about' redirects to 'displayName' by default (in  
> ContentItem), but is overridden in several Item subclasses and  
> Annotation classes.
>
> We currently have a mechanism for the Date column that works like  
> this:
> - ContentItem has a 'relevantDate' attribute that is indexed and  
> displayed in the Date column of the dashboard view. There's also a  
> 'relevantDateSource' attribute that's currently used to display the  
> source of the selected item's Date value (though it's currently not  
> localized).
> - Items (either ContentItem, its subclasses, or annotations on  
> ContentItem) that want to provide a relevant date do so by  
> implementing schema.observers that call  
> ContentItem.updateRelevantDate() when a related date attribute  
> changes.
> - ContentItem.updateRelevantDate() calls AddRelevantDates() on  
> itself any stamping annotations, and the Remindable annotation, and  
> picks one to update 'relevantDate'/'relevantDateSource'.
>
> I'm proposing that I do something similar for 'who', though I now  
> think that 'relevantDate'/'relevantDateSource' would be better  
> named 'displayDate' and 'displayDateSource'; I'd do that, and make  
> the 'who' fields be 'displayWho'/'displayWhoSource'.
>
> We don't appear to need the same dynamic-ness for 'about' as well,  
> so at least for now, I'd get rid of the redirections from 'about'  
> to 'displayName': we'd index 'displayName' instead of 'about'. Any  
> ContentItem subclasses or Annotations that wanted to have their own  
> name for the displayName could use a redirectTo as they do now;  
> however, anyone who redirected 'about' to some other field would  
> need that redirection replaced by one to 'displayName' -- for  
> example, the Amazon parcel has a ProductName attribute and used to  
> redirect 'about' to it; now, it would have a redirection from  
> 'ProductName' to 'displayName' instead.
>
> If we need to show alternative names for the field in the UI, such  
> as 'Subject' if it's an email, and 'Product Name' if it's an Amazon  
> item, a separate mechanism will be built to look up a localized  
> name at display time.
>
> To allow the repository to stop supporting a generic 'displayName'  
> mechanism, we'd declare a concrete schema.Text 'displayName'  
> attribute on ContentItem.
>
> Comments?
>
> Thanks,
> ...Bryan
>
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