I had given this idea some thought when I was listening to how palantir connects to outside sources and allows data to be mapped in, even if it cannot be imported.
What came to my mind was some kind of user interface to create a mapping between information in a database with an arbitrary schema and XDocuments and XObjects and then "map in a space" so to speak. Trying to imagine how the user would explain their schema in terms of documents and objects is where I ran out of ideas, it would certainly take a masterpiece of user interface. The search matter is another mess since everything handles search differently. If we're going to map in someone's legacy Oracle database and their JIRA, we can probably make queries work okay. If we're going to think big and map in Excel spreadsheets, directories full of Word documents and sqlite email spools, we have to look at ways to soup up Lucine to handle our XWQL searches in-house. Of course if these things can be imported, we can use what we have but importing brings up issues with synchronization and possibly authorization (where the wiki operator might have permission to access a database but not have permission to mirror it). Thanks, Caleb On 06/12/2012 03:06 PM, Ludovic Dubost wrote: > Hi Devs, > > I'd like to start a discussion about a Connector module for XWiki. > XWiki is a great tool to create, edit and organize information. But > while we can use macros to display external data, many XWiki's > organization (such as the livetable), editing and viewing features can > only be used for data stored in the XWiki System. > However from time to time we've seen that it would be really interesting to: > > - allow editing/viewing of data from external systems using the XWiki > form system > - using livetable and search on external data > > I've been thinking for a while that we can achieve that in XWiki by > transforming data read using an external API into XWiki Documents and > then use the XWiki APIs to display that data. We can also implement > livetable backends that would transform the livetable filters into > query supported by the external tool. And if all this could be > implemented as a "Connector Interface" most of the presentation code > would be generic and we could develop and install connectors and > magically you could make use of the XWiki development system to > display, present and create forms to edit data. > > I've made a prototype for Salesforce and JIRA that shows the concept > and what the API could be (in this case in Groovy) and wrote a design > document that explains the system and the open questions: > > http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/ConnectorModule > > In my view this system is super powerfull if we can build it in the > XWiki Core so that the view/edit/save/search can be hooked to the > connector so that from the user experience the system is transparent > to the user. > > WDYT ? Could the devs provide some insight of what the right > architecture should be for such a feature. > > Ludovic > _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
