Hi All,
I'm working through a simpler approach to Concept Proposals that what has
been attempted several times before, and never finished, and I thought I'd
share my thoughts while they're fresh.
I'm particularly interested in the scenario where:
- In the cloud there's a concept authority (in my case MVP/CIEL) who
manages your dictionary, and you periodically pull updates from there
- You have one server that has your official concept dictionary (could
be your metadata, forms, or production server)
- No development work happens directly on this machine. Concept
dictionary and forms are developed elsewhere, and imported.
- You have one or more development machines where you do
(potentially-messy) development and testing of forms
So, the forms development workflow would basically be:
1. On a development machine, starting with your master dictionary, you
work on a form. It is expected that you will create a bunch of new
concepts, revise them, and delete some of them that were mistakes.
2. When your form is ready-to-go, you identify all concepts on your form
that do not come from the master dictionary (i.e. they were newly-created)
- with HTML Form Entry this should be easy to automate, by checking
whether there are any concept references not in the form of
MVP:###. Maybe
XForms and Infopath could do something similar.
3. You send that batch of new concepts up to a web service on the
concept authority in the cloud, as proposals. You get back tokens you can
use to check the status of your proposals.
4. (Periodically you ping the concept authority, until all proposals
from that batch are resolved.)
5. You hit the concept authority and download its official versions of
the concepts that you created locally, and these *replace* your
locally-created concepts.
- I hope we can leverage the Metadata Sharing module to do this
pretty easily.
6. (Depending on the form entry technology) You edit your form to refer
to the new official versions of the concepts you proposed.
7. At this point you export the form from your dev machine, and import
it into your metadata/forms/production server.
I think the difference between this and prior work on Concept Proposal is
that I'm saying:
1. You should do forms development on a separate dev machine whose
dictionary is expected to get messy.
2. Instead of creating concept proposals, you create actual concepts, so
you can do real testing with them.
All this leads me to think that we can produce a minimum viable
product<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product> of
the Concept Proposal module with only these features:
(client-side, for use on forms development machines)
- every time you create a new concept, it is marked as "temporary"
- you can view a list of all temporary concepts, and delete ones you
don't like
- you can select some temporary concepts and "propose to master
dictionary"
- you can see a list of all your submitted proposals, along with their
current status
- when a proposal has been marked as complete by the server, it will
overwrite your local "temporary" concept with the new one officially
created, and clear the "temporary" flag.
(server-side)
- web service for proposing a batch of concepts
- web service for checking the status of a proposal
- UI showing a list of all open proposals
- UI for choosing the action for each item in the batch of proposals
- Created New Concept (specify the concept)
- Already Exists (specify the concept)
- Rejected (specify the free-text reason)
- Email notification when a new proposal comes in.
It's possible that some ThoughtWorks developers-in-training might work on
this as a project. Or I might propose this as a sprint. What do people
think about the approach? In particular, is there anyone out there who
finds this approach consistent with their needs, and would contribute some
dev time to helping make it happen?
-Darius
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