Hi guys, I wanted to talk about TopicNames again. Mainly this is me talking out what I've found and seeing if anyone has any thoughts about it.
So, when we last chatted, I think that Craig thought that most anything should be valid as a Topic Name, and I tend to agree. This means that we would have to work around different aspects of the application to ensure that the rules of each particular piece of the application/engine that needs to deal with the Topic name would do so properly. I was looking to add to our fw site...[1] and ran into the situation where different parts of our app need to protect itself from funny characters in different ways. A couple so far: FileSystemStore can't handle characters from Path.GetInvalidChars(), the LinkMaker can't handle URL "control" characters, The SqlStore probably needs help with handling "'". The formatter (argh!) has its own rules of what is a topic and that's got nothing to do with anything anyone else says about it. The PathInfo mechanism of determining the namespace and topic just flat out doesn't work with (certain) URLEncoded characters in the Name of the html file... It goes on.... Originally, I mentioned basically making TopicName only accept the LCD of all these restrictions, (which is still probably the easiest route to take,) but this is overly restrictive in my mind, and doesn't take into account the restrictions of whatever someone adds next (A new Store, for example) Not to mention, that this would mean that I couldn't add my feature[1] and that would displease me. So, where I am is this.... Each of the various pieces of the app (LinkMaker, PathInfo parser, FileSystemStore, Formatter, etc.) has rules about what to do to encode/decode and/or recognize the TopicName to make it safe for that piece and to reconstruct it to pass on to different pieces of the app. One way is to make each piece responsible for that work, but a) it seems easy to miss some existing code that needs to apply this work, but doesn't and b) it would spread something logically the same around to different parts of the app. The plus side to this, is that there is nothing to invent. "Just" find all the places that need to handle funky topic names and code around that. Another way is to try and smoosh this functionality into TopicName itself... I don't have any concrete ideas, but I'm thinking something like a ctor on TopicName that takes an ITopicNameFormatter in where ITopicNameFormatter has a Format and Unformat method on it. Maybe override ToString() to accept this guy instead or in addition. I don't know of a standard .net construct that would do something similar, but if there is we could use that instead of inventing a new class. I guess that I'll leave it at that... I'll continue tinkering around with things, but I would appreciate comments, ideas or experiences on this. thanks, nathan. [1] I want to create a "bookmarks" page based on the logged in users name and then have the topics on this page linked in via some wikitalk in the RightHandBorder. Logged in user names for us are DOMAIN\user. The backslash in a topic name currently blows chunks in different parts of the system. So I started making the FileSystemStore handle, then saw that the links couldn't take it either, but for different reasons.... ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Flexwiki-users mailing list Flexwiki-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flexwiki-users
