[Xerte] Re: Xerte 2: MVC approach to displayed text

Fri May 6 13:47:24 BST 2011

Some thoughts on your other questions:

1.      Some of the Page Wizards offer additional features which would have to be considered for acceptability in the Xerte official releases.

2.      Some pages will need to offer some optional parameters that will only relate to Page Wizards as a Page Wizard based page can be used in projects which have or do not have an Entry Frame and also be used either in the Interface or a Framework - both issues affect the working of features like Restart buttons.

3.      There are some Page Wizards that do not exist in Page Templates and On-line Toolkits and there would have to be a decision as to whether these would be included. Perhaps we should be considering a formal process by which contributors outside of the Xerte team can submit new pages for inclusion in Xerte, or to have a set of standard pages that are included with Xerte and then have a location on the wiki where new page wizards and project templates can be submitted by contributors and downloaded by users.  (maybe even given a star rating by users similar to amazon book reviews).

4.      What would you want to do with respect to routed pages? At present you have no pages that can direct users to other pages, so they may be useful to you, but when using them it can make sense to offer a different navigation e.g. a queue based back button like you have in a web browser.

5.      Once we have a common set of .rlm files it would make sense to keep the files in line which means some means of handling changes to the Page Wizards in future. It also begs the question as to whether the Page Wizards should be considered for inclusion in the official release.

1.      Yes, but please engage to get the changes accepted before distributing them in any other way. That way we can work together to get code consistent, and iron out any issues / improve things and the files can belong to the core set of files. That's a good thing for you. It's more difficult if you start distributing your files, users begin using them, and then you want to add them to the core set, and there are issues, because we then change the files and your users are left stuck.

2.      They can have their own xwd?

3.      See 1. We want to set up some cyclical development thing where we have known points for suggestions, development, testing, acceptance, distribution, probably quarterly. That will make it easier for us to collaborate, but the time to get changes through the system is still short enough for you to live with.

4.      Open minded.

5.      Where possible the files should be the same. It might be that the final distribution of page wizards has some extra stuff in it, but it should be easy for you to make the distro. I think that should be the goal: take this folder, take that folder, merge them, zip them. Something easy like that.

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: 06 May 2011 08:41
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Xerte 2: MVC approach to displayed text

If there are nodes in the xml that don't have corresponding nodes in the xwd, the wizard will just ignore them, but you'll still be able to fish them out using learningObject[0].pageName[0].language[0].prompt for example.

Then you can have the language stuff in the xml, which is defined in the newNodes section of the xwd, or your initial xml file.

I'll pack everything up later,

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Kemp Johnathan
Sent: 05 May 2011 18:04
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Xerte 2: MVC approach to displayed text

On the language front I think that the issue for someone wishing to use Xerte for foreign students lies with the .rlm file and the xwd and xml files.

In the .rlm file all text that displays when the page is run should be definable in a wizard form. I agree about the issue of avoiding a long form. In the Page Wizard I solve this by adding a separate block e.g.
<learningObject>
    <dialogLang>
      <tryAgain type="TextInput" label="Try Again Prompt"/>
      <continue type="TextInput" label="Continue Prompt"/>
      <showAnswer type="TextInput" label="Reveal Prompt"/>
   </dialogLang>
  <dialog>
     .. all the usual dialog xwd contents
  </dialog>
</learningObject>

This results in the user being presented with a wizard that has two separate forms, so that no individual form need extend beyond the size of the form window. The structure of the Page Wizard xwd file concerned me as I was not sure it would be viable to duplicate this solution in Page Templates.

A further issue with the xwd file is that all combo boxes should have a data statement so that anyone modifying the file for foreign language use can then change choices like "left, right, centre" to their foreign language equivalent without affecting the operation of the page (they would need to adjust the defaultData statement as well). They could also change the labels the wizard displayed.

The Page Wizard xml file receives an additional line e.g.

which again I am not sure if this could be implemented in the Page Templates project template.

With respect to the .rlm file we are talking all displayed text - labels like question n of m, phrases like "you have scored", labels on buttons e.g. next, restart.

The above should allow someone to convert Xerte to any language as far as both student and course designer are concerned.

I would like to achieve a point where we have one set of .rlm files and thus the Page Wizards and Page Templates project file offer identical functionality. This would work well then for shared documentation.

This raises some additional issues as

1.      Some of the Page Wizards offer additional features which would have to be considered for acceptability in the Xerte official releases.
2.      Some pages will need to offer some optional parameters that will only relate to Page Wizards as a Page Wizard based page can be used in projects which have or do not have an Entry Frame and also be used either in the Interface or a Framework - both issues affect the working of features like Restart buttons.
3.      There are some Page Wizards that do not exist in Page Templates and On-line Toolkits and there would have to be a decision as to whether these would be included. Perhaps we should be considering a formal process by which contributors outside of the Xerte team can submit new pages for inclusion in Xerte, or to have a set of standard pages that are included with Xerte and then have a location on the wiki where new page wizards and project templates can be submitted by contributors and downloaded by users.  (maybe even given a star rating by users similar to amazon book reviews).
4.      What would you want to do with respect to routed pages? At present you have no pages that can direct users to other pages, so they may be useful to you, but when using them it can make sense to offer a different navigation e.g. a queue based back button like you have in a web browser.
5.      Once we have a common set of .rlm files it would make sense to keep the files in line which means some means of handling changes to the Page Wizards in future. It also begs the question as to whether the Page Wizards should be considered for inclusion in the official release.
What are your views?

Kind regards

Johnathan

On 5 May 2011 11:57, Julian Tenney <Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk>> wrote:
> Unless there is a strong feeling from the Xerte team that they would not want the Page Wizards to offer better support for international use then I would like to implement this as part of a significant update to the Page Wizards.

No, we'd be up for doing that. What you are saying is that every piece of text in the page is editable by the user? All prompts / feedback are editable, where some are currently hard coded in there?

I'm trying to think through them all in my head. What I don't want is a really big wizard form that will intimidate people, but I think most should be OK?

Shouldn't we be aiming for one set of files, now you've got rid of your learningObject[0] dependency, or do you still see two sets of files?

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