[Cosmo-dev] Re: Multiple Collection Design Issue with Chandler Alpha 4

[Jeffrey Harris]

Hi Adam,

> There appears to be a design issue involving the way collections are
> published to Cosmo from Chandler Alpha 4. When you publish the Chandler
> collections show up in a folder called freebusy, When you go into Cosmo
> the UI seems to need these collections to be published to the root so
> that the UI can pick them up and allow you to swap between them.  After
> talking with mde and bcm, it appears that everyone did their piece
> correctly, unfortunately they don't work correctly together.
> 
> It seems to me that it is pretty important that this feature is
> functional, or at least some decisions are made incase changed need to
> be made before Cosmo 0.5 release.

That freebusy parent collection is a historical artifact of bug 6610 not
yet being implemented in Cosmo.  In retrospect, I wish I hadn't bothered
with the freebusy collection hack, since to the best of my knowledge
almost no one has successfully dogfooded freebusy reports (partly
because Chandler doesn't have a sophisticated workflow for freebusy,
partly because the freebusy implementation hasn't been tested very
thoroughly and has thwarted the few lone souls who have attempted to use
it).

Now that 6610 has been implemented, we should move Chandler away from
creating that collection at all.  This will be a bit of a pain as some
Chandler users will be using Cosmo pre-0.5, others will be using 0.5,
but I don't think we need to put too much effort into making sure
freebusy works perfectly for Chandlers talking to older Cosmos,
virtually no one's using the feature now, anyway!

I've filed bug 7251 to change the freebusy implementation in Chandler.

Long term, we may want to think about whether Chandler and CosmoUI
should be assuming all interesting collections live in a flat hierarchy,
but for the near term, I think CosmoUI can assume flatness.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey