[cosmo-dev] a new year, same problem

[Randy Letness]

Travis Vachon wrote:
> When Bobby uses the web ui to look at his collections, he'll first 
> look at "work" and see Brian's changes. At this point there is no way 
> for the web ui to know that a different change has been made in "my 
> stuff," since the data in that collection hasn't even been requested 
> from the server. A few possible solutions:
>

I think this is ok at least for the short term.  In this case Bobby is 
doing some complicated stuff (re-sharing an item), which requires 
conflict  management, which Chandler can handle.  Ideally the server 
would provide some cool apis that would make resolving conflicts a snap 
and the web ui could take advantage of this.

> Similarly, updating an item in multiple collections at once is 
> infeasible because, with the exception of some overlay related ui 
> state scenarios, the client has no way of knowing which collections an 
> item belongs to. Solution (1) above would help solve this.

I think the list of collections an item belongs to should be included in 
the item representation.  The client could then include which 
collections to update in the request.


>
> All that said, I don't like the idea of leaving the desktop client as 
> the only party responsible for syncing copies of items, as it 
> basically takes away server support for relationships between copies 
> of an item (except for the fact that we'd keep uuids that would be 
> shared by all copies of an item, if we do that). It seems to me that 
> entirely stand-alone users in this world would essentially never see 
> the relationship between copies of an item.
>

I agree, but for the short term I think its ok considering target users, 
and the amount of work involved.  Moving to this model solves the 
security problems with items in multiple collections and provides other 
benefits.  But, the webui loses certain functionality when dealing with 
items in multiple collections.  Can we live with this initially and then 
come up with an innovative way for the webui to deal with these copies?

-Randy