On Jan 31, 2006, at 8:45 PM, Philippe Bossut wrote:
Morgen Sagen wrote:
(B) User Notifications: I'm not sure if I'm talking about what
has been referred to as "big-N Notifications", but clearly what
is needed for sharing is some way for the user to see a log of
changes that happened as a result of syncing. Currently you can
see such changes flash by quickly in the Sync dialog, but Mitch
proposed the idea of having a sidebar collection which acts much
like an RSS feed of changes. We could add a new Kind to the
domain model named "UserNotification" (or some name to
distinguish it from any internal notifications). Changes made in
the background during syncing would get a corresponding
UserNotification item added to the Changes collection. The user
could then, at their leisure, scan through the changes via the
list view of that Changes collection, and either mark each
UserNotification as "read" or else delete the UserNotification
item. This same mechanism could be used not just for sharing-
related changes, but for any kind of thing that needs to be
brought to the user's attention in a non-immediate manner. These
UserNotifications could be fed into a single collection, or
multiple collections, depending on preference. This requires
from CPIA: (1) a way to sort the list view, and (2) some sort of
'mark as read' facility.
I don't like this idea of an RSS collection to post what are
basically activity log info. Internally, I'm fine with having those
info treated as items (of a relevant kind as mentioned here above)
but, from an end user standpoint, this is a very different kind of
info, not relevant to "tasks" or "projects" but rather to the
internal health of the application/system.
I'd prefer to have these info reviewable in a specific panel/
drawer. Looks like this could be a first incarnation of the
"Activity Viewer" proposed by Jeffrey earlier. We could also have
other status and failure info, currently fleetingly displayed in
the status bar, being logged there (see recent IRC discussion on
the subject).
Fair enough -- internally the notifications will most likely be a
persistent collection of items, and they can be rendered any number
of ways. We already have the facility to display collections in the
List View, which is why I proposed that (and we even have sorted
tables now!). If additional work can be done in 0.7 for other forms
of display, that's great. :-)
(C) Conflict Resolution: In 0.6, when two people change the same
attribute on the same shared item and synchronize, the first one
to sync wins. The second user gets a notification of the
conflict in the Sync dialog, but their local change is lost,
overwritten by what the first user assigned. There are a few
approaches we could take to provide better conflict resolution:
(1) Quarantine all background sharing changes until the user is
at a point where they are ready to incorporate all of those
changes. The user is then presented with each conflict (either
one-by-one or altogether) and they choose from either the local
change or the remote change. All conflicts would have to be
resolved at this point, otherwise the repository could not
continue with the repository view "refresh". (2) Pick an
automatic conflict resolution policy ('local changes win' versus
'remote changes win') and when a conflict happens follow that
policy, but in addition add a special kind of UserNotification
("ConflictNotification"?) item to the Changes/Notification log
collection, recording in it which Item/attribute had the
conflict, and what the two attribute values were. I prefer (2);
this would allow sharing-related changes to appear at any time
(since from the repository's standpoint, conflicts are resolved
immediately), and allow the user to review/resolve conflicts at
their leisure. Ideally reviewing a conflict would mean clicking
on a ConflictNotification item in the list view and being
presented in the detail view with a side-by-side comparison of an
item -- local changes next to remote changes -- and buttons
allowing the user to pick between the two. This project would
require some CPIA work for presenting a conflict resolution
detail view.
I first choke on the "conflict resolution detail view"... After
reflection however, one could imagine little icons (a la "!" that
Excel for instance displays on cells for some minor auto fixed
issues) that once clicked would give the various conflicting
versions for the field and a choice. OK for small fields though,
not OK for the notes... Hmmm...
I don't really know what's feasible for the UI for this in 0.7, but
we need something (could be simple). How fancy this gets is up for
discussion. Philippe, when you say you "choke" on the idea, is it
the idea itself, or the amount of work it would take, or ???
Anyway, I agree on "as automatic as possible", so +1 on (2).
Cheers,
- Philippe
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