Hey Jason, First of all for future questions, the [email protected] list is a much better place for these kinds of questions, there's a lot more implementers and shindig coders hanging out there then here (see http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/community/getting-help.html for details on how to sign up there)
On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 3:16 AM, Jason <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi All, > > I'm working on an RESTful OpenSocial implementation using Shindig and > have run into a few questions. Sorry if any of these have been asked/ > answered before, but I had trouble finding the answers in this group > or in the spec. > > 1) I'm not entirely clear how Activity requests are supposed to handle > an associated Person. I see that Activities can have a field > "userId", but what if I want to include more information about the > Person? Do I put it inside the field "templateParams" inside either > the "person" field or the other fields in the ActivityTemplateParams > type? > Activities at the moment is really just very simply 'title' and 'body' + optionally a set of media items associated with it, there's no expected place for storing any extra type of info. Recently as activities, life streaming, real time etc have been taking off some people got together to come up with a much richer activities spec, http://ActivityStrea.ms, and we're working on defining how this would fit in OpenSocial (which requires rules for being able to munge the input & output to json, xml as well as atom), so that will definitely cover these requirements. Now with AS.ms you still need a regular atom 'content' section, ie a blob of simple html that regular atom readers can interpret and display, so if you implement the regular simple activities now by generating a body with html, that will be reusable for the AS.ms output as well. If you want to be able to support richer activities right away, you could of course start implementing AS.ms seperately, but if there's no huge rush, you could also wait for the definition & implementation in OpenSocial to be done. > 2) How am I supposed to handle fields that are specific to an > Activity. For example, let's say I have a review activities that has > an attribute "rating". Rating doesn't exist in Activity (it exists in > MediaItem, but this is not a MediaItem). What is the desired way of > dealing with this, is there a field that fits this situation? Should > I create a special field for it, leave the information out entirely or > possible overload the "body" field with more data? > > As mentioned above, OS doesn't really support this at the moment, however once we have the AS.ms extension that will change > 3) For the @supportedfield request, how do should I deal with > different Activities having different sets of fields returned. > Ignoring the previous question, for example, one type of Activity may > have a "url" associated with it while another may not. For > @supportedfields, should it return the maximum set? or somehow specify > a type -> field set mapping? > > That's a question we haven't really handled in the OS & AS.ms discussions yet, at the moment we're just looking at how we can map atom -> json & xml, but once that's done (and we have setup a simple prototype proof of concept) this is definitely something that will have to be discussed as well. AS.ms defines verbs and actors, and depending on the type of action it has different fields associated with it (rating, image url, comment text, link, etc). @supportedFields on the other hand so far has only been applied to simple situations where there's a consistent amount of field entries for the main type (people, activities), so it's an interesting question and I hope you'll sign up for the opensocial-gadgets-and-spec list to contribute your thoughts on it -- Chris --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Implementing OpenSocial Containers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-container?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
