[Design] Restore and Free/Busy

[Sheila Mooney]

So I mucked around with this a bit. I agree there is a bit of  
weirdness with the free busy stuff. Personally I install new versions  
of Chandler all the time and it's very convenient to be able to  
restore the shares so I don't have to create and give out a new  
ticket to everyone. I kind of think of free-busy the same way. I will  
have published this, sent the ticket to many people who are  
subscribed and just because I wipe out my repository, I don't want to  
have to do this again. I just hook up my existing shares and  
continue. I should be able to somehow reconnect up with my free busy  
as well.

So basically, right now when the ifb is created, it uses the My  
Calendar collection for updates. There is a dependency between the  
free-busy data and the My Calendar data. If I delete my repository  
and start over, I really don't want to restore the old free-busy  
data, I want it to use whatever is in the My Calendar collection. I  
could have imported all the data into My Calendar to be the same as  
before I deleted the repository but, I may not. In this case, I  
really want the ifb to recalculate itself based on the new data in My  
Calendar and it isn't quite the same as restoring an old share. Maybe  
if the user tries to publish free-busy again, they are prompted with  
a dialog asking if they want to update the ifb that the currently  
have (not sure if we can even do this). There could also be a  
checkbox in the restore dialog but I agree with Philippe, it's funny  
to have it in the list of shares and it doesn't quite work the way we  
want.

There is also this weird situation where I publish the My Calendar  
collection and I publish my free-busy. Sorry this isn't a good use  
case but let's say Katie is looking at both my free-busy and has read  
write access to my calendar. If I delete Chandler, can she continue  
to update my free-busy when she makes to my calendar? I would say  
yes. In reality Katie might not have both the free-busy share and  
access to my calendar directly but she could edit my calendar that  
will update the free-busy share others are subscribed to. If I  
reinstall Chandler, what happens when I restore my free-busy? I may  
have restored the My Calendar share first, in which case, I just kind  
of reconnect to what everyone else is doing. If I restore my free- 
busy but change the My Calendar collection what happens? Would the  
free-busy be recalculated so everyone subscribing to the original  
URL, would just get the update when they synched?

The above paragraph kind of addresses the question of what if I don't  
reconnect/restore my free-busy. It may continue to have a life of  
it's own. I like the idea of being able to remove it. I thought we  
had that logged as an enhancement already, if not I will add it to  
the dogfood list.

Sheila

On Apr 12, 2006, at 12:54 PM, Philippe Bossut wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm bringing this here because we're starting to have a "design  
> discussion in Bugzilla" and we better have that one here.
>
> The bug is: http://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5639
>
> The issue is about showing or not showing the .ifb (free/busy)  
> share in the Restore dialog: when using this dialog after  
> restarting Chandler on a clean repository (something you still need  
> to do on a regular basis because of the absence of schema  
> evolution), you can now see the free/busy share in there.
>
> I was thinking that it shouldn't be there at all, my rationale  
> being that if the user published the free/busy, the user should  
> simply be considered a "free/busy" publisher kind and act as if  
> this info has just been published by said user.
>
> Jeffrey is pointing though that the free/busy is a share like any  
> other share and that, apart from its display, it's not different  
> from a collection.
>
> I think I understand Jeffrey's point however, I wonder:
> - what "restoring" free/busy should do? Right now, it creates a  
> collection with empty events which is plain wrong, that's not what  
> the publisher of the free/busy share wants. What he wants is to  
> have Chandler in a state that was identical to what it was before  
> he has to clean up his repository, i.e., the .ifb over there and  
> recognized by Chandler (so that Sync works).
> - what "not restoring" free/busy means? Now if I choose not to  
> restore the ifb, what is this ifb supposed to be? Can others still  
> subscribe to it? what does it mean to do that? As a user, what I'd  
> like to do if I'm not restoring something is to delete it so that  
> no one takes those info into account anymore. Having an option to  
> delete a share right here and there in the Restore dialog would be  
> extremely useful (for Cosmo folks, I know you can do that through  
> the Cosmo web UI but I'm talking about doing this from Chandler)
>
> Thoughts?
>
> - Philippe
>
>
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