[Dev] Zaobao comments

[John Anderson]

Ted Leung wrote:

> This is mostly for Katie and Alec, but...
>
> I took some time to go poking around the Zaobao parcel, and I have 
> some comments.
>
> It's interesting to note that the two parcel.xml files take up about 
> 13k, and the python files (RSSData.py, blocks.py, ZaoBaoWakeupCall) 
> take up about 8k.  I suppose that I should be happy that the "data" 
> definitions take up more space than the behavioral code (not counting 
> the honking feedparser).  Except that the parcel.xml is really pretty 
> verbose.   I don't have many suggestions for the schema/parcel.xml 
> file.  It seems like it's pretty much doing the minimum amount of 
> work.  The main parcel.xml is a different story.
>
> The main parcel.xml has lots of items in it -- like 3 or even 4 items 
> for each ContentDetailItem.  Some of those items are reusable, and 
> might eventually migrate into the framework, but it seems like a lot.  
> It might be worthwhile to have some custom syntax for 
> ContentDetailItem that would allow us to build some of these common 
> situations more quickly -- a lot of the items are StaticTextItems, for 
> example.
>
> When you "install" Zaobao, you get a new menu entry under File->New 
> Item, to create a new ZaoBao channel.  This is the only menu 
> introduction that I saw.  I'm assuming that this happened because 
> RSSChannel is a subkind of ItemCollection?  It's a little bit of a 
> mystery to me as to how that menu item got there.   In general, I'm 
> unclear as to how a parcel would introduce menu items and wire them up.

http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Chandler/CpiaZeroPointFourStatus 
describes how menus get wired up

>
> When we create a Zaobao channel, we create an itemcolletion for it.  
> What would we do if we wanted all RSSItems to go into a single 
> ItemCollection (RSSChannel or not)?  If we did that, it looks to me 
> like we can't easily take an RSSItem and find its RSSChannel 
> (bidirectional ref on items would help here).
>
> I see that we are rendering the body of an RSSItem using 
> osaf.framework.blocks.detail.Detail.HTMLDetailArea.  Is the widget 
> behind this Mozilla based or something else?

It's a CPIA blocks, which use wxWidget's HTML widget, which currently 
doesn't use Mozilla

>
> I know this is out of scope for 0.5, but I'm curious about the plan 
> for allowing a custom summary table item/view.  I can imagine a 
> summary view that also shows a few lines of the RSSItem body, for 
> example.

CPIA can do this today -- and in fact that's the way the summary view 
works -- however, we proably need to add 20 lines of code to make it 
"parcel developer" friendly -- which could be done by pycon. It's new 
work that was part of 0.5, which will get added to the CPIA documentation.

>
> I'll probably have some more questions later...
>
> Ted
>
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