Comments for configuration values

Dear All,

One of the items lacking documentation in Seaside is the configuration
app. I still dont know what some of it actually does!
I have added the ability to add comments to seaside/config values. If
anyone would like to contribute more comments they would be most welcome.

this code and comments is now available in the Seaside28Jetsam package

Keith




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Hi

I think this a great idea, but IMHO it would make more sense to
comment the configuration attributes instead of the values and then
also present the these comments.

Say hello to your new Seaside config app (see attachment).

Cheers
Philippe

2007/12/9, Keith Hodges <[hidden email]>:
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Philippe Marschall wrote:

Hi

I think this a great idea, but IMHO it would make more sense to
comment the configuration attributes instead of the values and then
also present the these comments.

Say hello to your new Seaside config app (see attachment).

Cheers
Philippe
  

Hello Philippe,

I tried that approach earlier, I even used tooltips to begin with, however they can only provide very limited information about some fairly complex choices.

My current scheme asks the configuration ancestor to provide a comment for the current value of the attribute.
The comment displayed can also depend upon other configuration values.

I came up with this idea because I am developing a fairly comprehensive MagmaHelper scheme.

This scheme has one selector providing a choice between the following helper classes. (Any one application can have two of these)

            WAMagma 
            WAMagmaBasicPool
            WAMagmaSolo 
            WAMagmaShared
            WAMagmaSharedAuto 
            WAMagmaSoloAuto 
            WAMockMagma 

Each of these attribute values provides a comprehensive explanation as to what it does. The explanations tell the user about the database commit strategy that they have selected, and so they are quite verbose.

e.g.

"WAMagmaSoloAuto is specifically designed as the simplest and most transparent of the Magma-Seaside helper options. It is the same as WAMagmaSolo but provides an automatic #commitAndBegin, writing data to the database following callback processing, just prior to rendering.

<br><br>

'Solo' indicates that Seaside is the only user of the database and therefore has the latest data available without any need for an explicit refresh. If the code does perform a manual #commit: it is protected so that multiple Seaside users do not accidentally overlap the application of their changes to the database. Since a manual #commit: in this instance is a sub-transaction it would normally be ignored, however WAMagmaSoloAuto performs an #abort prior to any manual #commit: this abort should not revoke any local changes made to the data model, and the manual #commit: will be performed, followed by a #begin in anticipation of the next automatic #commitAndBegin."

Ok so this might be slight overkill, but it places the information directly in the place where it is needed, there is no need to look at code in order to configure the application.

:-)

Keith




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Other uses for the comments on values...

MySqlConfiguration attribute #mysqlHost can ping the given host and
report the host's availability (or lack of) in its comment.

best regards

Keith
 
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