Hi, Brian
I think Bryan's point is that we remove displayName from Item, as
well as the repository API (getItemDisplayName()) that uses it.
You're right that having a generic and occasionally localized
attribute like that doesn't work.
ContentItem will have displayName, but it's the user-settable
attribute (like email subject, etc) that you are calling 'title'.
Bryan wants to call it 'displayName', because that will fit well with
'displayDate' and 'displayWho' : they're all the values that are
displayed in the summary table.
--Grant
On 31 Oct, 2006, at 16:35, Brian Kirsch wrote:
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_source_ of a redirection (the index gets out-of-date really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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