Asynchronous sharing (was Re: [Dev] Services, CPIA, Content Model intercommunication)

[Donn Denman]

On Nov 5, 2004, at 1:22 PM, Katie Capps Parlante wrote:

> Morgen Sagen wrote:
>> Also, a related question is whether the sharing/webdav code should 
>> operate outside the UI thread like the mail layer.  Currently it all 
>> operates on the main UI thread, which seems suboptimal, but making it 
>> asynchronous would also get us into the situation where perhaps the 
>> item (or item collection) the user is currently viewing gets updated 
>> as the result of some background task.
Concerning user items being changed while being viewed/edited: One way 
to limit interaction between the UI thread and the proposed Sharing 
Thread would be to use a different repository view for each.  This 
would keep changes out of the UI thread except during refresh/commit 
calls in the UI thread.  In theory, we could tightly control when we 
refresh/commit those changes across the views, and the changes could 
happen all at once, maybe in response to a user action or a period of 
user inaction.  In practice, however, the UI thread is already doing 
refresh() calls frequently; when the Mail service is running to get 
changes and progress notifications across.  Ideally refresh() could 
take a view parameter and it would refresh the current view with 
changes only from the specified view.  Then the UI thread can bring in 
Mail changes without bringing in Sharing changes.  This might be a 
tricky change to the repository, and would affect commit too, so it 
clearly requires more thought (Andi?) before we take this idea 
seriously.


>> Do we have a story yet for the desired behavior (from the design 
>> group) and implementation details/problems (from the CPIA folks)?
>
> My understanding is that the only reason that sharing happens on the 
> UI thread was due to lack of time to make the necessary fixes to the 
> Task Manager/Notification Manager in .4. I would presume that the same 
> mechanisms used to update views should happen in both cases -- the 
> CPIA views are notified when collections or items change. Its 
> currently the case that this only works correctly for collections, and 
> not edits to individual items. We've currently scheduled work to get 
> this right in .5.
>
> Perhaps folks working more directly on the problem can highlight any 
> current snags/problems that might still be outstanding...
>
> Cheers,
> Katie
>
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