Anil Ramnanan wrote:
Ross Gardler wrote:
+1 - Anil this can be removed without any impact on the completeness of
your project, if we get time, and the discussion has been settled then
we will address this.
I will remove it. The first thing I would like to work on is the Site
editor. I had intended to do this using the Eclipse Modelling Framework
if there was and XML schema for the sitemap available. Otherwise I will
have to do a normal tree editor. Any comments ?
The sitemap and site.xml are two different things. The sitemap describes
how Forrest should process requests - see
You will not be building an editor for this since the Lepido project
already has one (I checked this morning their code is now in CVS, but it
has not been publically announced yet).
Site.xml describes the structure the site, i.e. what files go where.
There is no DTD for this file, we have discussed having one on occasion,
but at present there isn't one. Since there is no DTD you have two choices:
a) start a discussion about whether we want one or not
b) go with a basic tree widget and ensure it creates valid XML
However, before doing that we really need to decide what the editor will
look like as this will have an impact on the way you implement it. I see
there being two options:
+------------+----------------------------------------------+
| | +
| | +
| File | +
| Navigator | Page Editor +
| | +
| | +
| | +
+------------+----------------------------------------------+
| | +
| | +
| Site | +
| Editor | Properties Editor +
| | +
| | +
| | +
+------------+----------------------------------------------+
Here we have easy drag and drop between the file navigator and we can
quickly switch the page being edited by clicking on the site editor. It
will also allow us to quickly see a preview of the site structure when
it is edited. However, we are limiting the space available for the file
navigator and site editor.
+------------+----------------------------------------------+
| | +
| | +
| File | +
| Navigator | Page * site Editor +
| | +
| | +
| | +
| +----------------------------------------------+
| | +
| | +
| | +
| | Properties Editor +
| | +
| | +
| | +
+------------+----------------------------------------------+
Here the page/site editor is a tabbed editor, one tab providing access
to the site structure, the other providing access to the page contents.
This set-up will increase the number of clicks needed to find/add a page
in the site editor but it will allow more control over what the site
editor looks like.
Note for technical reasons with Eclipse it is not possible to have an
editor that will appear in both the views section (i.e. the left or
bottom of the application) and the editor section (i.e. the top right in
the above diagrams).
Personally I prefer the first method. However, the EMF will not create
the view we need to do this. In Burrokeet I have tweaked the code to
allow this to happen. However, I would not recomend doing that, it has
caused all sorts of problems for us. In other words, if you go with the
first route then I would recomend building a custom viewer.
Do others have any opinion on the best layout?
Ross
