Hi devs,
I've been thinking about Displayer architecture today and here are my thoughts
on how I see them implemented (without entering low-level details):
Basics
======
* Everything in XWiki should be a Component and should be able to be
implemented in Java and optionally extended in wiki pages (wiki components
notion)
* Have a Displayer component Role (ie a java interface for displayers)
* Have default implementations in the display module for all basic types we
want to support (textareas, date, string, number, etc). Basically this means
rewriting the current displayers as components.
* Allow to register Displayers defined in wiki pages by using wiki components
(same mechanism as wiki macros).
* Since a lot of Displayers are better written in wiki pages (javascript, css),
create a UI submodule of the current display module which contains displayers
we want bundled by default in XE (for ex for Dates and Users/Groups)
* Extend the current {{display}} macro to support displaying Objects and Object
Properties (it already supports passing an EntityType parameter but it's not
used ATM).
* The {{display}} macro will use the CM to get an instance of a displayer for
the Object property type. It'll do by finding the XClass and getting the type
from the XClass and then do a getInstance
* Add an optional parameter to the {{display}} macro to support passing a
displayer hint (by default it would use the "default" displayer for the
property type). This will allow some pages to decide which displayer to use to
render their content without being forced to use the default displayer.
Advanced
=========
In order to make it easy for a given class or a given object to decide how to
display itself we could also define some special DisplayerBinding XObjects (one
per property type). It could work like this:
* If the {{display}} macro has the displayer hint specified as parameter then
use it
* If the {{display}} macro doesn't have the displayer hint specified then check
if the xclass document has a DisplayerBinding XObject defined and if so use the
displayer pointed to by the binding
* If the {{display}} macro doesn't have the displayer hint specified and the
xclass document doesn't have a DisplayerBinding XObject defined then check if
the object to display have such an XObject and if so use it
* Deprecate the notion of "custom displayer" that we have in our XClass since
it wouldn't be needed anymore
WDYT?
I know we're not there yet but it would be cool to make progress on the
direction we'd like to take.
Thanks
-Vincent
_______________________________________________
devs mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
