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

[Noah Botimer]

(I'll reserve comment on the particular JIRA issues below, keying on  
the upshot.)

In general, I advocate for idempotency of views (GETs). However, I am  
interested in a studied exploration of those "viewing is doing"  
scenarios.

Perhaps the most familiar example is reading a message in a forum.  
We've come to expect that the system will "know" what I've seen. This  
could certainly be implemented with script and a delayed POST to mark  
a message.

Maybe there is a reasonable pattern we can encourage here. I would  
especially like to see our AJAX implemented as progressive  
enhancement more than it is, so a good example could be very  
powerful. Note that this "new stuff" topic comes up more with more  
active environments, so we are headed right for it.

I think that, if we distinguish between places that are intentionally  
"viewing as doing" and those that are incidental, we end up with  
clearer awareness and paths forward.

Thanks,
-Noah

On Feb 8, 2010, at 1:07 PM, Stephen Marquard wrote:

> 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
>
>
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