2017-07-12 Content Types Discussion

12 Jul 2017 

Attendees

• Mikaël Geljić
• Ilgun Ilgun
• Philip Mundt
• Aleksandr Pchelintcev

Outcome

• We seem to have consensus against re-introducing definition builders maintained by hand (like those we reverted before 5.0)
  • Either verbosely build/nest configured definitions w/ plain constructors (no new def code)
  • And/or we give a shot at leveraging Sasha's code-generation efforts for this
• Current PRs are not production-ready
  • Either reach production-grade without datasource awareness: little (fixed) to no workspace, name-space & node-type registrations
  • Or depend upon having a better shared understanding of our datasource definition requirements (workshop to come)
    

Discussion log

• Intro / Context
  • 2w action plan, GO from architecture group
• UI / AppDescriptor builders flavor
  • Code-generation 2w effort; result was parked
    • Generator from main, w/ annotation for def classes (Definition intf)
    • https://wiki.magnolia-cms.com/display/DEV/Configuration+by+code+via+generated+builder+DSL
    • plain AP built on top of google-auto commons/services + JavaPoet for "class template"
    • https://git.magnolia-cms.com/projects/PLATFORM/repos/main/pull-requests/460/
  • Mika
    • was voting for AP-generation for a long time
      • would generate Configured* impls as well
      • not against changing our "input" (interface w/ getters, vs. concrete classes w/ fields)
    • or ideally have Java APIs usable without any "proxy config" (no def, no app descriptor)
      • e.g. new JcrContentApp(workspace, ....)
      • a bit too wishful pbly (esp. for content apps, workbench)
  • Further dev ticket / timebox to interface App generation w/ generated builders
    • MGNLUI-4238 - Getting issue details... STATUS
  • Does decoration play "nicely" with semi-pushed generated defs into app registry
  • Workshop for defining the datasource
    •  Mika yet to file / schedule that
    • DEV-617 - Getting issue details... STATUS
• Content app defaults
  • yet to formalize patterns, actions, columns
  • crud, publishing, import-export
  • 3 different stock apps have different flavors of actionbar section availability
  • even the groovy generator is not fully "canonical"
• Security model
  • default roles (Editor / Publisher)
  • ownership model

• Sasha: ideally, ContentAppDescriptor fully consuming the ContentTypeDefinition
  • apps
    • foo
      • class: JcrContentTypeAppDescriptor
      • contentType: myfoo
      • form
        • layout
      • feature-driven config
  • providing bold/brand-new config to support higher-level use cases / user stories
    • macro-magnolia features
    • activation, personalization, workflow, folders, tagging, ...
    • CT def vs. AppDescriptor
  • composing views
  •  decorating generated defs becomes slightly complex / technical
    • not ideal if it's all what's there 

•  Status of PRs was confusing