Hi Bryan,
There has been much talk over the .7 release of removing displayName
all together.
The ambigious nature of the displayName makes it less than ideal for
localization.
Since all items have a displayName attribute, it becomes difficult to
determine which displayNames appear in the UI and thus need translation.
John Anderson was looking in to removing all displayNames from the
Chandler code base
at one point.
The proposal was to use an alternate attribute such as title for
localized displayable values.
I have been off working on Mail and have not given the displayName
issue much thought as of late.
Perhaps now is a good time to re-raise the discussion.
-Brian
On Oct 31, 2006, at 2:16 PM, Bryan Stearns wrote:
The time has come to deal with a couple of issues around attribute
redirection:
- We need to index 'who' and 'about' attributes for the dashboard,
but (a) the repository can't index an attribute that's the _source_
of a redirection (the index gets out-of-date really quickly,
leading to several of my alpha5 bugs), and (b) for 'who', a static
redirection isn't good enough because the 'who' value needs to be
determined on a per-item (not per-subclass or per-annotation) basis.
- A related issue is that we're trying to get rid of the dependence
on the repository's generic 'displayName' mechanism on Item;
currently, 'about' redirects to 'displayName' by default (in
ContentItem), but is overridden in several Item subclasses and
Annotation classes.
We currently have a mechanism for the Date column that works like
this:
- ContentItem has a 'relevantDate' attribute that is indexed and
displayed in the Date column of the dashboard view. There's also a
'relevantDateSource' attribute that's currently used to display the
source of the selected item's Date value (though it's currently not
localized).
- Items (either ContentItem, its subclasses, or annotations on
ContentItem) that want to provide a relevant date do so by
implementing schema.observers that call
ContentItem.updateRelevantDate() when a related date attribute
changes.
- ContentItem.updateRelevantDate() calls AddRelevantDates() on
itself any stamping annotations, and the Remindable annotation, and
picks one to update 'relevantDate'/'relevantDateSource'.
I'm proposing that I do something similar for 'who', though I now
think that 'relevantDate'/'relevantDateSource' would be better
named 'displayDate' and 'displayDateSource'; I'd do that, and make
the 'who' fields be 'displayWho'/'displayWhoSource'.
We don't appear to need the same dynamic-ness for 'about' as well,
so at least for now, I'd get rid of the redirections from 'about'
to 'displayName': we'd index 'displayName' instead of 'about'. Any
ContentItem subclasses or Annotations that wanted to have their own
name for the displayName could use a redirectTo as they do now;
however, anyone who redirected 'about' to some other field would
need that redirection replaced by one to 'displayName' -- for
example, the Amazon parcel has a ProductName attribute and used to
redirect 'about' to it; now, it would have a redirection from
'ProductName' to 'displayName' instead.
If we need to show alternative names for the field in the UI, such
as 'Subject' if it's an email, and 'Product Name' if it's an Amazon
item, a separate mechanism will be built to look up a localized
name at display time.
To allow the repository to stop supporting a generic 'displayName'
mechanism, we'd declare a concrete schema.Text 'displayName'
attribute on ContentItem.
Comments?
Thanks,
...Bryan
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