CDO/Explorer (work in progress)

Bugzilla 258638: CDO Explorer is used for discussion and to track progress. Everybody is invited to participate in whatever form!

Vision

The CDO Explorer is a client-side RCP application that demonstrates all the core functionality of CDO. It is expected to provide re-usable user interface components as well as a default distribution in form of an RCP application. CDO users shall be enabled to download a single setup.exe file and install a complete technology stack, including repository server, database, the CDO Explorer client, possibly a CDO Admin client to (re-) configure the repository server.

We'd like to demonstrate the following:

• strict use of data binding
• together with asynchronous node expansion
• drag and drop of objects to create references
• extensible repository browser view
• extensible form editors for single objects
• neat integration of all the optional CDO functionality, like:
  • query definition and execution
  • import/export of resources
  • resource browsing (integrated in the generic repository browser)
  • history browsing
  • explicit locking and a locks view
  • local and remote annotation of CDOModelElements
• others?

Description

The following screen stub can be used as a basis for more detailed UI descriptions.
The content of the open editors in the screen stub is irrelevant, it's just to illustrate the general use of the forms toolkit.
The stub project is available via CVS: org.eclipse.emf/org.eclipse.emf.cdo/incubation/CDOExplorer

Repository Browser ViewPart

The root elements of the Repository Browser are CDO Repositories with all the CDO structure elements below them:

• Virtual Packages node: EPackage, EClass, EAttribute, EReference, EEnum, ...
• Virtual Resources node: CDOResourceFolder, CDOResource, CDOObject

Browser would allow to provide some basic actions as:

• Open object editors
• Copy & Paste CDOFolders and CDOResources
• Delete CDOFolders and CDOResources
• DnD (default behaviour would be cut & paste, could also be copy & paste by holding CONTROL key)
• Create, Rename, Move CDOFolders, CDOResources & CDOObjects

Items in the tree should be decorated, depicting some important aspects of their state. For instance, CDOFolder, CDOResource or CDOObject could have a read/write lock. An overlay icon and colored label should depict this.

Asynchronous refresh is an important requirement. We should make exemplary use of org.eclipse.emf.databinding. Blocking UI thread should never happen.

The properties view should be populated with data from selected items in the browser. (EIKE: properties view does not depend on the IDE but I guess it's rarely present in real RCPs!)

• Wizard-driven configuration definition: The new definition model would allow us to define how the different parts of a CDOSession/CDOView object are wired. Step by step, a configuration wizard will help user how to define that configuration. Help commands should be provided everywhere the user might feel lost. This wizard will be as simple as possible. Advanced features and other configuration aspects would be accessible through double click in the repository connection item. Furthermore, this item in the browser will be presented as a higher level "repository connection" concept to the user, being in fact a CDOView.

Other ViewParts?

• Log View: Shows server side events, not fine-grained. Events like folder/resource created, moved, deleted, modified. Lock set/released. Successful commits, conflictive commits. Each action should be logged together with a timestamp, user-name... (EIKE: Vik, do yu really mean server-side events??)
  • Allow saving the log to a file
  • Create a report through BIRT
  • Optional (low priority): We might even create a Log Model ("CDO Event Model"), so we can persist it in the CDO repository as well :P We could then extract statistics from this log model to identify user behaviour, bottlenecks, more detailed statistics... Queries might be applied over this log model. We should also consider existing usage monitoring technologies and TPTP.

• Object change history: A view that would show a list of all the registered changes of an object selected in another focused ViewPart or EditorPart. User could "pin" this view so it stops listening to further selection changes, so the history of certain object remains in the ViewPart while navigating.
  • Is it possible to perform queries over a list of objects states in time through our query API? Something like "give me all object states between 1 January and 6 February".

Other EditorParts?

• Extensible multi-page editor: User could contribute, through extension points, additional pages to the default editor. We could provide some nice pages too.

Design

The repository elements of the repository browser view are internally CDOViews or CDOAudits (switchable through properties). When they are not audits we enable modification actions for folder, resource and object creation and manipulation. All these commands are executed in background jobs and open a CDOTransaction, modify the object graph and commit.

Bugzillas

• 258638: CDO Explorer