uPortal IRC Logs-2008-08-21

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[12:11:18 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i'm having a portlet design issue w/ the calendar/news portlets, if anyone is feeling opinionated
[12:23:42 EDT(-0400)] <holdorph> i'm definitely opinionated.
[12:23:55 EDT(-0400)] <holdorph> but I can't promise that defect will help you out in any way.
[12:33:07 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> well, it might
[12:33:57 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> so basically the calendar and news reader portlet currently share data for a user between all portlet instances
[12:34:15 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> this is great when that's what an institution wants
[12:34:25 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> but you might plausibly instead want all portlets to contain different data
[12:34:40 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> so a user could make a news portlet full of institutional stuff, and another instance with different feeds
[12:35:01 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> eric and i had talked about accomplishing this by saving the set id in the portlet preferences
[12:35:19 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> so you'd get a set created for that portlet, and then the id for it would get saved in the preferences
[12:35:41 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> this is great in theory, but of course the first time the portlet's called, it's a render request, which means you can't save anything to the portlet preferences
[12:36:22 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i guess we could just create a default set and not store it to the database, and wait until the user adds/removes feeds to actually store the set and the associated preferences
[12:36:58 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> but that makes this progressively more irritating and complicated
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[12:37:29 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> and i could see us running into problems w/ that approach in the future, since we might move some of the editing features to ajax screens, and then there's no access to the preferences there either
[12:39:42 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> aw i scared colin away
[12:48:47 EDT(-0400)] <holdorph> I'm not sure I understand why the ajax work would impact the approach you mention.
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[12:54:02 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> well
[12:55:09 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> if we were using action requests like making changes to the selection of feeds to save the feed set to the database and store the resulting set id to the preferences
[12:55:25 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> and then we elimated those action requests in favor of ajax requests in the background, it wouldn't work
[12:55:53 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> assuming the ajax requests went to servlets rather than the portlet
[12:56:54 EDT(-0400)] <holdorph> ok.
[12:57:44 EDT(-0400)] <holdorph> my suggestion would be. yes, there is a real pain point that the first 'user' experience with the portlet instance only goes through render. because of that, I've had to put some amount of 'init' type code in most of my render methods.
[12:58:00 EDT(-0400)] <holdorph> it sucks, I wish I didn't have to. but there's no way to avoid it for the reason you stated.
[12:58:05 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah
[12:58:16 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> you mean some sort of repeating init type code?
[12:58:23 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i worry more about the users who just never make any changes
[12:58:33 EDT(-0400)] <holdorph> so, I'd just try to get the portlet preference. if it's not set, then, set something for it in the session. until you get a chance to set it.
[12:59:18 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah
[12:59:28 EDT(-0400)] <holdorph> 'getting portlet preferences' is an example. because I know that probably involves a db lookup, I only want to do it once. then keep it in the session.
[12:59:45 EDT(-0400)] <holdorph> so in my render, I check for it in the session, if it's not there, then I go get it from portlet preferences.
[12:59:53 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> right
[13:00:10 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> the portlet does that kind of thing
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