UIO Strategy meeting recap

[Justin Obara]

Today several of the UI Options developers met to talk about the UIO API and how to best implement it. A new focus for UIO will be configuration through a schema. You can see more info about the schema and new API as they shape up on the wiki.

http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Schema+for+UIO+preferences
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Proposal+-+New+UIO+API

I'll try to summarize the gist of the conversation. For those present please feel free to correct any mistakes or add anything that was omitted, and everyone please feel free to bring up any other questions or comments. 

First of all, any implementation of UI Options and/or UI Enhancer should expect a schema to be provided. The schema will likely be a subset of or derived from the one held by the GPII server. It will describe the settings themselves (e.g. default value, max, min, etc.). These will also be handled through grades. Meaning that a UIO implementation would be made up of grades for the schema, settingsPanel, and enactors. Every setting should have it's own grade, and we'll package up a "one-stop" grade for easy implementation.

When an enactor or settings panel attempts to look up its model value, if there isn't one present, it will use the default value from the schema. This will be facilitated through the strategy configuration of fluid.get in the "model relay". The "model relay" will be used to keep all of the models for the settings panels, enactors, and store in sync. The settings panel config for things like max/min will also be sourced from the schema but will be configured directly. The settings panels themselves will still have default values for these in their options, but when configured in UIO it will be directed to pull the values from the schema through IoC configuration.

Immediate Work

move min/max out of the settings panels' models, into standard options
write a starter schema ( for the settings in our starter grades )
update the "model relay" to be "schema aware". To source defaults from the schema.
source the values for max, min, and etc. from the schema when panels are configured in UIO

Future Work 

provide a "schema" for component level configuration of the settings panels
strings, template locations, etc.
improve the model relay to handle transforming values to different formats

Thanks
Justin

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