|
Background
Gather some basic knowledge about RDF and XUL, and how
they can be used in Zope (unless you already have).
Links follow:-
From zope.org: Look at everything under
The Zope Mozilla Initiative
From mozilla.org:
RDF in mozilla |
The XPToolkit Project.
How it works
File List
This is a list of all the files (objects) and a
brief description about what each does:-
| Object | Description
|
|---|
| thisitemRDF
| Produces a snippet of RDF for the object in context.
This RDF contains one Description element which
descibes this object only. Even when the object is a folder,
the RDF does not contain information about the
contained objects.
|
| contents.rdf
| Produces an XML-RDF document for this object which
includes all the contained objects as well. Useful only
in context of folderish objects. Uses 'thisitemRDF' to
generate snippets of information about contained objects.
You can look at the RDF produced by this for any
object by pointing your (non-mozilla) browser to
http://my.zopeinstall.com/path/to/object/contents.rdf
|
| zide.xul
| The XUL file defining the user interface.
|
| zide.js
| The javascript file.
|
| itemiconcss
| Produces a snippet of CSS which identifies an icon
with a tree-item of specific id. Recursive so that
it produces the CSS for all folderish objects under the
one in context.
|
| main.css
| Produces a CSS StyleSheet with formatting options.
Includes the icon image definition produced by 'itemiconcss'.
|
| itemiconcss
| Produces a snippet of CSS which identifies an icon
with a tree-item of specific id. Recursive so that
it produces the CSS for all folderish objects under the
one in context.
|
In addition, two required files from
Management tree in Mozilla : tree.rdf and itemRDF
are used to produce RDF for all folderish objects for
the tree-view. itemRDF is recursive and produces RDF
snippet for contents of the entire subtree below the
object in context. tree.rdf wraps up itemRDF of the
root folder. itemRDF differs from thisitemRDF as
itemRDF is recursive, i.e includes itself for
all its folderish contained objects.
Working
Hopefully, now you have some idea about how the thing works
(assuming you've read the File List descriptions).
Mozilla loads up zide.xul which has two main widgets.
A tree on the left (call this zm-treeview) and a tree on
the right for showing the contets list (call
this zm-contentsview). The zm-treeview widget has
http://zoperoot/tree.rdf as its datasource. This never
changes. The datasource for zm-contentsview is initially
set at http://zoperoot/contents.rdf. When the user
clicks on treeitem in zm-treeview, code in zide.js
changes the datasource of zm-contentsview to
http://zoperoot/path_of_selected_folder/contents.rdf.
Mozilla magic does the rest.
Design Flaws
- The two widgets use some common data but use different
data sources :tree.rdf and a set of contents.rdf. These
contain common information but produced separately.
It is
possible for a widget to
use multiple data sources and for differnt widgets to use
the same data source, hence data should
not be replicated by two different data sources.
- The stylesheet identifies icons for a tree with
the 'id' attribute. They should be identified with
'class' or 'type' information.
The Future
To Do List
- Fix design flaw #1: One way to do this is that
the folder-view tree also use the contents.rdf
data sources. It can load up the root contents.rdf initially
and then keep adding data sources of subfolders as
the user expands them.
- Functionality: Double-click folder items in the contents-view
list to open the folder and also set focus in tree-view.
- Functionality: Right-click items in any view for
viewing detailed properties about the object in
another box.
- Investigation: Find out how to get mozilla to
refresh a data source so that if the source data has
changed, the changes are reflected in the widget.
Possible Directions
- The xul, css and js files can be moved to the 'chrome'
folder in the mozilla tree, instead of keeping them
in the zope installation.
|
Log in
Forgot your password?