[Dev] Zaobao comments

[John Anderson]

I think a lot of these issues could easily be addressed by PyCon.


Alec Flett wrote:

>
> Hey ted - I think I can answer many of your questions...and these are 
> all good things for me to address in the ZaoBaoTutorial.
>
> Ted Leung wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
> I agree. This is one of my pet peeves about the parcel.xml framework, 
> and something I've been talking with Grant about for a week or two. 
> See http://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1013
>
> In general, the parcel.xml syntax is way to verbose for building a UI, 
> and most UI developers will be horrified with our current syntax. I 
> think if we can get a few things changed in parcel.xml, like this bug, 
> then we'll make huge strides towards simplifying UI creation.
>
>> 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.
>
>
>
> We don't have such a mechanism for stuff to "insert" itself into the 
> menus, unless there is already some UI visible in the current view. 
> its a bit of a chicken and egg problem, really. So for 0.5, its hard 
> coded in. Since hooking it up originally I have a much better 
> understanding of CPIA and shouldn't have any problem getting something 
> hooked up for 0.6.. not that it helps us for PyCon though.

I'd like to fix this as part of a upcoming planned CPIA refactoring -- 
it shouldn't be too hard.

>
>>
>> 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).
>>
> What I want to do now (now that I understand queries a bit more) is 
> hook up a query to the ItemCollection in the sidebar - something like 
> for i in RSSItem where i.channel = <channel> -
>
> even now we could pretty easily hook up a single ItemCollection which 
> shows all news items.
>
> We had bidirectional refs before I hooked up general item collections 
> there. I thought I had re-hooked up RSSItem.channel, but maybe I 
> overlooked it? It wouldn't be hard to add back.
>
> Its quite possible that I'll be able to hook up bidirectional refs 
> again when john finishes with his ItemCollection changes.

If I understand it correctly, you might be able to just drop in the 
correct query string of an item collection, which would just display the 
items that match -- no bi refs or code necessary.

>
>> 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?
>>
> nope, wxWidgets has its own HTML widget...
>
>> 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.
>
>
>
> Certainly a possibility. I've talked a little with John about the idea 
> of hooking up meta data to an ItemCollection in the sidebar, that the 
> delegates could use to determine how to display the ItemCollection. 
> (As John would say "Its easy, its just a matter of figuring out 
> *where* to hook it up")
>
> Alec
>
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