I explored using User pages as a storage mechanism for the minimal viable product for the collections work the mobile team is doing. The goal is to prove the success of the feature and then feed our findings into the multiple lists in core RFC.
I completed a proof of concept patch for storing collections as lists. Essentially it stores all the meta data associated with a users collection as a page at User:<username>/MobileWebCollections.json You can test it out by: 1) checking out: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/188225/ 2) visiting Special:MobileCollections 3) refreshing page and seeing a collection with 2 items in it Whilst doing this I have discovered that potentially race conditions could be an issue with this approach. The sample code carries out various transactions and the end state can differ based on which finish first. I'm not much of a PHP expert so I'm not sure how to remedy this problem. It may not be a problem based on the fact that we only anticipate one user managing these lists at a given time. Apart from the race condition it seems to work nicely. I imagine the API could also be used to handle watchlist watch and unwatch actions so that we wouldn't have nasty special cased code for watching articles. Currently the API is only designed to work on private lists for the current user. I would expect a user parameter to be added later. Let me know if you have any questions. _______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
