[Building Sakai] Tool-based logic and side-effects of views

[Stephen Marquard]

Hi all,

I'm concerned about the amount of business logic related to CM and memberships that seems to be ending up in Site Info (site-manage project), e.g. these two JIRAs:

http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-17260
and
http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/KNL-403

appear to be addressing the same issue, except that SAK-17260 does so from the Site Info tool, whereas KNL-403 updates the logic in the authz service.

What I find troubling is that there are essentially side-effects from one what might expect to be a read-only view, viz. going to Site Info but not taking any action.

Here's another example of tool code that can update the state of underlying objects from a view page (Announcements):

http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-17062

This just feels wrong to me - updates should only take place when actually triggered by an update action, not as a side-effect of a user viewing a page (except for things like updating statistics and view counts).

Regards
Stephen