[Xerte-dev] Re: Connectors

[Smith, John]

Yes, definitely, that's a possibility but might slow down the user interface. We'll only know when we come to try...

Yes holding off modularizing xenith was a good call but the scope issue is still there. Fay has now renamed all the core xenith stuff to begin x_ so there shouldn't be that many collisions. What I've done in one of the models - can't remember which is wrap all the initialization code within an init() method within the model declaration and then just calling it straight afterwards.

Regards,

John Smith
Learning Technologist
School of Health & Life Sciences
Glasgow Caledonian University

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Dave Burnett
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2012 2:51 PM
To: xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Connectors

This pattern stuff is over my head, but if I'm following generally is there any way to not just load async, but load on demand?
In desktop I always set stuff like the Glossary to load on first demand, then stay loaded.

________________________________
From: J.J.Smith at gcu.ac.uk<mailto:J.J.Smith at gcu.ac.uk>
To: xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2012 14:42:07 +0000
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Connectors
Yeah, Crocky's stuff is good. I've kinda gone off that module pattern though and think what we need is one of the Singleton patterns. The problem with the module pattern, which is sets about solving, is scope between submodules. Since we are going for modularity etc I was thinking that perhaps Xenith should be modular too, i.e we only load the Glossary module is they have defined a Glossary, similarly for narration, a JSONP manager etc... Why load all the mobile & touch stuff if it's on a desktop... would also possibly speed loading slightly by making the submodules load asynchronously.

While it's not such a problem while xenith is relatively small, when it gets bigger it would be good for code separation. People could then be given certain "sub-modules" to look after...

Just an idea though...

Regards,

John Smith
Learning Technologist
School of Health & Life Sciences
Glasgow Caledonian University

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2012 2:28 PM
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Connectors

On the subject of advanced JavaScript and patterns, I've learned quite a lot from Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: the good parts' and 'JavaScript Patterns' by Stoyan Stevanov over the last couple of weeks. The patterns book is particularly good, a good point of reference for us as we get more into this stuff I think

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Smith, John
Sent: 15 November 2012 14:24
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Connectors

Yeah, I've committed code which extracts all the linkIDs and records them in the page object for each page. There is also  a regular expression that looks for asfunction:_level0.engine.fnTextCon,ID and replaces that hyperlink with x_navigateToPage(ID). This was required to allow the connectorPlainText model that I commited last week to work. Given the new pattern (or a selection of them) I can incorporate them to also point to that x_navigateToPage method.

I know we have said no but it  does still work with pageID and just page number also as default. That functionality can be removed easily though...

Regards,

John Smith
Learning Technologist
School of Health & Life Sciences
Glasgow Caledonian University

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2012 1:58 PM
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Connectors

I'm not sure what you mean. Somewhere a page will have a linkID attribute in its xml

<accNav linkID="PG123456677".../>

And somewhere else another page will navigate to it via some central function call like navigateTo(linkID). I'm not sure Xenith has that yet? In the xerte stuff it rootIcon.gotoPage(n) //after finding n somehow

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Smith, John
Sent: 15 November 2012 13:51
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Connectors

Decide on the formatting of the embedded link and I'll update the xenith code so that it should work straight away there.

Regards,

John Smith
Learning Technologist
School of Health & Life Sciences
Glasgow Caledonian University

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2012 1:42 PM
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Connectors

OK. So we can push on with making the linkID / pageList stuff work in toolkits, that will naturally apply to the pageTemplates projects, and you guys can then sort out the page wizards implementations.

What do you need me to do?

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Kemp Johnathan
Sent: 15 November 2012 12:00
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Connectors

I have just had confirmation from Tom that the use of one .rlm file and two xwd files in the manner discussed earlier will not cause any problems for the creation of templates.xwd files or translation issues.

JK

On 15 November 2012 11:58, Kemp Johnathan <johnathan.kemp at ntlworld.com<mailto:johnathan.kemp at ntlworld.com>> wrote:
If Xerte and XOT can share the same .rlm file then this will give the best integration between Xerte and pageTemplates and XOT and pageTemplates. Support and development work on the rlm files can still carry on in Xerte with any necessary changes to the data they consume being accommodated by editing the respective two xwd files. The rlm file will know that in Xerte Pages mode it is getting pageIDs and in pageTemplates / XOT it is getting linkIDs.

We need to finalise how the navigation options will work to be certain that this will not preclude this option.

JK



On 15 November 2012 11:41, Julian Tenney <Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk>> wrote:
The crux of it seems to be then, how do we support connectors in page wizards?

Otherwise, the linkID / pageList controls make a big difference to the usability of connectors in toolkits / page templates projects.

So options;
Support them through a different set of files that are only deployed in page wizards in standalone Xerte
Or drop them from page wizards / standalone xerte

Is this the consensus we're reaching?


From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>] On Behalf Of Kemp Johnathan
Sent: 15 November 2012 11:31

To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Connectors

To try to narrow this down it seems to me we need to

1. Resolve the navigation option handling for the Connector Pages in XOT
2. See if it is still possible to use a single rlm file and two xwd files
3. If it is possible then we have the option to run with Xerte Pages projects and XOT / Page Templates still using the same .rlm files.
4. If it is not possible to run with a single rlm file and separate xwd files for Xerte and XOT Page Templates then
either
a) We separate XOT and Xerte and they go their separate ways with completely separate sets of model files and xwd files but this could lead to discrepancies between pageTemplates projects and XOT projects as pageTemplates projects would be using the xerte rlm files.
or
b) We keep support for pages projects in Xerte but set the Connector pages xwd files to be only available to XOT. This will remove Connector pages from being available in Xerte and make them only available to XOT / pageTemplates.
or
c) We scrap all support for pages projects in Xerte and take Xerte back to where it was before page wizards or pages projects were developed. i.e You can round trip XOT to pageTemplates projects but you cannot access individual page wizards in Xerte.

Kind regards

Johnathan


On 15 November 2012 11:02, Kemp Johnathan <johnathan.kemp at ntlworld.com<mailto:johnathan.kemp at ntlworld.com>> wrote:
As a way of putting off the day we need to make a decision I can offer the following, but I don't know what impact any developments regarding the navigation aspects will have on this because I don't know what how you want to handle this yet.

I can produce a set of files for each connector page as follows using the connector menu page as an example below

connectorMenu.rlm
being a single rlm file that will work in XOT or Xerte

connectorMenu.xwd
being an xwd file that works in Xerte and is flagged for xerte only and uses text fields and Page IDs instead of pageLists

xot_connectorMenu.xwd
being an xwd file that works in XOT using the pageList control and is flagged to only be used in XOT

At present the use of the pageList control will break the connections set up in any legacy projects that are already created, unless it can be made to look up the linkID if the xml data contains data that does not begin with "PG".

The way the menu connector handles the option to specify a list of pages has changed so that the Author can select pages using the pageList control (or enter pageIDs individually in Xerte) so that will break legacy projects but it will present a consistent approach between the two.

In principle what should happen is when you build the template.xwd file the xot_connectorMenu.xwd file should get included and the connectorMenu.xwd file should get ignored. But I need to check with Tom if there are any implications with this.

I have attached a pageTemplates project example containing the reworked Menu Connector so you can see how it is panning out. I will need to edit the code a little to make it agnostic about pageIDs or linkIDs but that should be fairly simple.

I have used the linkID to locate the page index so don't I can manage with out a rootIcon.gotoPage(linkID) method. It is easier this way to work with both pageIDs and linkIDs.

This just leaves how to handle the plainText connector situation in which the Author cannot see the linkID value.

I had a thought about that. You could add a child element like I have in the menu Connector and then put an index value in the hyperlink e.g. <a href="asfunction:_level0.engine.fnTextCon,1" target="_blank"> would point to the first child element, <a href="asfunction:_level0.engine.fnTextCon,2" target="_blank"> would point to the second child element. The fnTextCon function could then look up the linkID from the xml data.

Then for all the connector pages we have the navigation options to resolve.

Kind regards

Johnathan

On 15 November 2012 10:12, Ron Mitchell <ronm at mitchellmedia.co.uk<mailto:ronm at mitchellmedia.co.uk>> wrote:
The only additional thing that springs to mind right now is whether there can be a check whether the project is a pages/page wizard project and in that case the pageList control isn't used and the old manually added pageID is used instead. I guess Jonathan is best placed to know whether that would work and what would be involved.

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: 15 November 2012 09:12
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Connectors

We need to figure out how we are going to deal with the connectors.

Summary
- We want to use the new pageList control in the wizard to allow users to create and use linkIDs behind the scenes. Users will simply select the name of the page they want to jump to from the pageList control. The pagelist control writes the linkID of the selected page to the attribute's value.
- This means re-working the connector pages to use the linkID rather than pageID (I don't think this is hard / lengthy)
- This brings a big improvement to the connectors in toolkits.
[so far so good

The same thing would also work with a page templates project in standalone xerte. Project's could still be round-tripped to toolkits and back again.
[so far so good still]

Problem
The problem is with the page wizards. When using the wizard there, there is no way of getting a list of pages in the piece, or generating linkIDs for them, so this approach won't work. Now there are many problems, because the page wizards share the code with the page templates models.

Considerations
Xerte standalone is pretty much at the end of its life.
Hardly anyone uses page wizards in standalone xerte.

Before we discuss options, is there anything else to add to this summary? Please keep comments short and to the point so that we can get a clear sight of the problem and the options we have available.


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Glasgow Caledonian University is a registered Scottish charity, number SC021474

Winner: Times Higher Education's Widening Participation Initiative of the Year 2009 and Herald Society's Education Initiative of the Year 2009.
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Winner: Times Higher Education's Outstanding Support for Early Career Researchers of the Year 2010, GCU as a lead with Universities Scotland partners.
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Winner: Times Higher Education's Widening Participation Initiative of the Year 2009 and Herald Society's Education Initiative of the Year 2009.
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