I recently checked in some functions that can be used for serializing/
deserializing items in a peer-to-peer context such as mail-based edit/
update sharing. Documentation is the API section of:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/Projects/SharingProject
From that page:
To support p2p sharing of individual items, the sharing package now
has inbound( ) and outbound( ) functions. Each function takes a
"peer" parameter which is any Chandler item that represents who you
are sharing the item with. For example, this peer might be a Contact
or emailAddress item; the inbound/outbound functions don't care what
it is as long as it's a Chandler Item with a UUID.
sharing.inbound( ) currently takes an EIMML string (although in the
future we will want the Translator and Serializer to be
configurable), processes it, and applies any non-conflicting changes
to the local item. The item is created if not already existing, and
stamped/unstamped as needed. Conflicts are stored in the share
item's "conflictingStates" ref collection. The API for accessing
conflict information is still TBD. A basic method called
SharedItem.getConflicts( ) returns a list of (peer, pending) tuples.
sharing.outbound( ) takes an existing item and returns an EIMML
string to transmit. If the item has any pending conflicts, outbound
( ) will instead raise a ConflictsPending exception.
Unlike server-centric sharing, the EIMML generated by outbound( )
always contains the full state of the item. It also contains some
additional information, including the sender's repository UUID, plus
the sender's version number of the transmitted item. This allows the
inbound( ) function to compare the peer repository UUID with the one
it previously saw; if it's different, inbound( ) assumes that the
peer has re-created its repository, and all the inbound records are
considered as changes. If the peer repository UUID is a match, then
the inbound records are compared against the previously seen state to
determine what's actually changed. Additionally, If the item version
embedded in the EIMML is less than or equal to the version number
last seen from this peer, an OutOfSequence exception is raised.
See the Itemcentric Sharing section of EIMML.txt for example usage:
http://viewcvs.o11n.org/chandler/trunk/chandler/parcels/osaf/
sharing/EIMML.txt?view=markup
~morgen
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