On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 18:38, Asiri Rathnayake<asiri.rathnayake@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello Devs,

This is about implementing support for creating rendering macros by editing wiki pages! The corresponding JIRA issue is http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-3213.

Introduction ------------

There are two main xwiki classes involved: XWiki.WikiMacro & XWiki.WikiMacroParameter. Fields of these classes are as below:

AFAIK the rule is to put Class at the end of the name of a wiki class (XWiki.WikiMacroClass, XWiki.WikiMacroParameterClass)

XWiki.WikiMacro | |-> name (Name of the macro) | |-> description (Short description about the macro - for display purposes) | |-> content (Macro content, this is what will be executed when the macro is invoked, can be any xwiki/2.0 content)

It should be any content depending of the document syntax not forced to xwiki/2.0 syntax.

XWiki.WikiMacroParameter | |-> name (Name of the parameter) | |-> macro (Name of the macro to which this parameter applies to) | |-> description (Description of this macro parameter - for display purposes) | |-> mandatory (boolean value indicating if this parameter is mandatory)

So the basic idea is, when a user saves (or updates) a page containing an Object of XWiki.WikiMacro type, we will dynamically register (or re-register) a macro as defined by that object.

Question:

1. What about macro name conflicts? Should we ask macro name to be unique? (This can be done if we introduce a document sheet and a template for creating macros)

We don't have much choice, macros names has to be unique anyway so the best to to provide sheet/template which help to manage this constrain and print warning for example. Now i'm not sure we need specific conflict management rules (the last registered will be the winner then), we could think about that later if it's becoming strongly needed.

Implementation steps --------------------

1. The original idea was to create XWiki.WikiMacro & XWiki.WikiMacroParameter classes upon XE startup (if those classes are not present). But I would like to start a little different here, we create xwiki-application-wikimacro application to host these two documents and later remove this app and add the initialization code. This will allow me to focus on other more important tasks upfront and meanwhile i can make any changes easily to these wiki pages if they are kept inside an application.

2. Document update / save event listening & Macro registration can be implemented using the ObservationManager and dynamic component registration mechanisms.

- Currently ObservationManager can only send general document save / update events. We can either use these events and filter only those we are interested (ones where an XWiki.WikiMacro object is saved / updated) OR we can introduce a new event like ObjectChangedEvent (which would be constructed given a class name) that is fired by xwiki-core appropriately.

- This document event listening & dynamic macro component registration code will be put inside xwiki-rendering/xwiki-rendering-macro-wikibridge

3. Finally DefaultMacroManager needs to be updated so that it listens to ComponentManager events and filters out those events corresponding to Macro component registrations and updates the internal macro cache.

So, above is the approach I have in mind for implementing the wiki-macro bridge. If you have any comments, please let me know.

You are not speaking about security here but it's a very important subject. With what you described any user could be able to register any macro usable by anyone in which he can do whatever he want with the rigths of the user of the macro. The best would be that a macro created by a user is usable only by himself until this macro is promoted as standard macro in some admin UI. But this mean we can't just register the macro as standard component when it's saved, we would need at least the standard list and the users list of macros in the DefaultMacroManager or support this standard component VS users component in a more generic way like the component realms suggested by Vincent. Maybe the first step only register the macro if the users which modified it has programming rights.

Thanks.

- Asiri _______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

-- Thomas Mortagne