[Zope-CMF] Re: [dev] enhancing Actions: a rough proposal

[Kapil Thangavelu]

On Fri, 2004-11-26 at 09:30 +0100, yuppie wrote:
> Kapil Thangavelu wrote:
> > fwiw, i'm -1 on this proposal as well. it seems to break compatiblity
> > and remove features, and the the only concrete use case i can discern
> > for the change is ui based. if its a ui problem then i'd rather just see
> > the ui fixed.
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by "remove features". My proposal aims at 
> consolidating what we have to make it easier to use, maintain, improve 
> and extend the Actions machinery. That's not just a question of UI.

okay. could you elaborate on what sort of extensions or use cases are
possible with this new model, that currently can't be implemented?
the only ones i've seen advanced are relating to have a central location
for ui based action manipulation. and even this seems not nesc true if
workflow and type actions are going to be manipulated separately, ie. if
compatiblity with existing providers is going to be maintained, and
instead there will be need be two models, which is fine by me ie. if
existing functionality and action provider impl can be preserved.

in terms of negatives and feature removal of this proposal, removing
action providers for, means to me replacing dynamic capabilities of
action providing by the application, in favor of relying on action level
tales filtering. using different action category implementations can
possibly compensate somewhat but the with the additional restriction on
category.

say for example, i have a versioning tool that provides a set of
multicategory actions based on whether or not the content is
versionable. if i want to dynamically provide actions based on context,
with the new mechanism, i would need to register relevant actions with
each action category. with the old model a tool could do a simple check
in restricted code and disable the whole action set if its not
versionable.  

or say i have content with dynamic actions based on object state (a
workspace with/ actions based on installed plugins or direct action
manipulation on the content for example), with the new model i'd have to
do it based on tales expressions that would need to be evaluated in the
context of all content, as opposed to the relevant instance. 

in terms of alternatives for central ui oriented changes, querying
providers and organizing in a virtual hierarchy of categories w/ global
priority based ordering within the action tools ui would achieve most of
the ui changes afaics.

cheers,

-kapil