There are a couple changes to the planet code which I would like to make
as part of the 4.0 release because I think they are important functional
improvements and because they fix some outstanding bugs.
1. Update feed fetcher
* add new method fetchFeed(String feedURL) which returns a
PlanetSubscriptionData representing the feed. this would be used when
adding a new subscription from a feed url. the need for this is further
explained in the last item below.
* modify refreshEntries() method to be updateSubscriptions(). the key
difference being that currently the refreshEntries() method only fetches
new entries for subscriptions and adds them, but the
updateSubscriptions() method will actually update the subscription *and*
its entries. updating a subscription will include updating the
subscription title, site url, author, etc, which we currently never
update after the subscription is initially added.
2. Update subscription handling process
* remove the ability to custom edit the title and site url for a feed,
these things are part of a subscription and should be extracted directly
from the feed. hand editing these things is both confusing and error
prone and from what i have noticed from using planet for a while it's a
PITA because if a subscription changes any of these things you may not
know about it and update your aggregation accordingly.
* remove the ability to modify a subscription for a group, you can only
add and remove subscriptions to groups by supplying a feed url. this is
based on a bug which i recently discovered. lets say we have a
subscription that is used in 2 groups and 1 of the groups decides it
wants to modify the subscription to point to a different url. currently
if that subscription is edited and saved it changes the subscription url
for all groups still referencing that subscription, which is wrong.
making this change will simplify the ui quite a bit, improve usability,
and fix this bad behavioral bug.
All in all I think these things are pretty simple and straight forward
but should add some nice improvements to the planet functionality. It
should only take me a couple days to do these things so I would plan to
have them done next week some time.
thoughts? comments?
-- Allen
