Improve the Action system
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Key: NXP-4961
URL: https://jira.nuxeo.org/browse/NXP-4961
Project: Nuxeo Enterprise Platform
Issue Type: Improvement
Affects Versions: 5.3.1
Reporter: Thierry Delprat
Assignee: Thierry Delprat
Fix For: 5.3.2
# Why we should improve the current Action system
The current Action system works and is used almost everywhere in the JSF WebApp.
Nevertheless, I think it's time to improve it.
There are several reasons for that.
## Make configuration more flexible
Current Actions implementation let UI template choose how to diplay the action,
not only in term of pure presentation but also in terme of type : JSF Post,
simple GET, JS call ...
As a consequence, each Action category is expected to contains actions that
should all be rendered the same way.
This worked so far, but it as begun to be a problem :
- some links that could be action are still hard coded because of this
- we have already begun to introduce fake categories to walk around this
problem
- it's hard for people customizing Nuxeo to understand these limitations
## Studio integration
If we want to be able to use studio to add and configure actions.
We will need to add more flexibility, otherwise the Studio UI will be
cumbersome and we will have display issues.
## Operation integration
We (mainly Bogdan) are currently working on a new Operations system.
The idea is to let a Studio user define an operations chain (like update
document + copy it somewhere + create a task ...).
Basically, these chains will be triggered by 2 means :
- non interactive : typically an event listener
- interactive : a button in the UI
In the first case, the operation chain will be conditionned by rules (using
drools).
For interactive triggered operations, they will need to be bound to an action
that will be responsible for UI + guards.
For that use case too, we need to make the Action system more flexible : we may
want to plug an Action-Operation in a category that currently only supports
links or JS.
## CMIS
CMIS has a notion of allowable actions.
Current implementation in nuxeo-chemistry is mainly hard coded, but in a near
future, we may want to have someting more powerfull and leverage :
- DM actions
- Operations
For this use case, we will need to change the Action definition and the guard
definition to make this usable outside of the seam context.
## MSOffice integration
We have planned to improve the integration between Nuxeo and MS Office.
In addition of doing the "save in Nuxeo", we may want to expose more Nuxeo
features to the MSOffice user :
- lock-unlock a document
- change lifecycle
- start a WF
- ...
My guess is that a signgificant part of these MSO actions will be very much
like :
- some actions already present in DM
- some actions we will want to expose in CMIS
We can also expect that a SI that uses Studio to create new Action/Operation to
apply some business processing to DM will be happy to expose this to the
MSOffice user too.
# What has to be improved
## Action types
We should add a type attribute on the Action descriptor.
This type attribute will be responsible for defining how the action should be
rendered (link, button, ...) and executed (GET, JSF Post, JS ...) (may be we
should have 2 separated attributes).
We have to provide full backward compatibility, but since currently each
Category is implicitly bound to a type, simply defining a default type per
Category should be enought.
## JSF Rendering
Ideally, we should provide a Tag to render an action according to it's type.
As a first step we can simply use facelets and ui:decorate, but the target
solution may be to have either a completly dedicated tag, or to render actions
using layouts and widgets.
## Filter and Context evaluation
The current implementation has at least 2 problems :
- we use JEXL that is not stardard
=> we should align an a standard EL
- Seam context integration is a hack in the deployment system
=> this is dirty and a blocking point for using actions outside of Seam
==> we should provide a Seam aware context from the WebActionBean and not have
a hack in the action-core service
( need to change API for context definition )
## Integration
We should use the action system in :
- Nuxeo-Chemistry
- LiveEdit API
- (ideally) web engine links system
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