Hi Darius,
I think this is a great solution, and would meet our form development
needs very well. We can certainly talk about potential for developer
collaboration on this, though I can't promise anything...
Thanks for thinking this through,
Mike
On 05/10/2012 02:01 PM, Darius Jazayeri wrote:
Hi All,
I'm working through a simpler approach to Concept Proposals that what
has been attempted several times before, and never finished, and I
thought I'd share my thoughts while they're fresh.
I'm particularly interested in the scenario where:
* In the cloud there's a concept authority (in my case MVP/CIEL)
who manages your dictionary, and you periodically pull updates
from there
* You have one server that has your official concept dictionary
(could be your metadata, forms, or production server)
o No development work happens directly on this machine.
Concept dictionary and forms are developed elsewhere, and
imported.
* You have one or more development machines where you do
(potentially-messy) development and testing of forms
So, the forms development workflow would basically be:
1. On a development machine, starting with your master dictionary,
you work on a form. It is expected that you will create a bunch
of new concepts, revise them, and delete some of them that were
mistakes.
2. When your form is ready-to-go, you identify all concepts on your
form that do not come from the master dictionary (i.e. they were
newly-created)
* with HTML Form Entry this should be easy to automate, by
checking whether there are any concept references not in
the form of MVP:###. Maybe XForms and Infopath could do
something similar.
3. You send that batch of new concepts up to a web service on the
concept authority in the cloud, as proposals. You get back
tokens you can use to check the status of your proposals.
4. (Periodically you ping the concept authority, until all
proposals from that batch are resolved.)
5. You hit the concept authority and download its official versions
of the concepts that you created locally, and these
/replace/ your locally-created concepts.
* I hope we can leverage the Metadata Sharing module to do
this pretty easily.
6. (Depending on the form entry technology) You edit your form to
refer to the new official versions of the concepts you proposed.
7. At this point you export the form from your dev machine, and
import it into your metadata/forms/production server.
I think the difference between this and prior work on Concept Proposal
is that I'm saying:
1. You should do forms development on a separate dev machine whose
dictionary is expected to get messy.
2. Instead of creating concept proposals, you create actual concepts,
so you can do real testing with them.
All this leads me to think that we can produce a minimum viable
product <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product> of the
Concept Proposal module with only these features:
(client-side, for use on forms development machines)
* every time you create a new concept, it is marked as "temporary"
* you can view a list of all temporary concepts, and delete ones
you don't like
* you can select some temporary concepts and "propose to master
dictionary"
* you can see a list of all your submitted proposals, along with
their current status
* when a proposal has been marked as complete by the server, it
will overwrite your local "temporary" concept with the new one
officially created, and clear the "temporary" flag.
(server-side)
* web service for proposing a batch of concepts
* web service for checking the status of a proposal
* UI showing a list of all open proposals
* UI for choosing the action for each item in the batch of proposals
o Created New Concept (specify the concept)
o Already Exists (specify the concept)
o Rejected (specify the free-text reason)
* Email notification when a new proposal comes in.
It's possible that some ThoughtWorks developers-in-training might work
on this as a project. Or I might propose this as a sprint. What do
people think about the approach? In particular, is there anyone out
there who finds this approach consistent with their needs, and would
contribute some dev time to helping make it happen?
-Darius
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