[Building Sakai] wsetup.home.toolids and Home page synoptic tool order

[Branden Visser]

Hi Zhen,

Comments are inline:

On Fri, 2010-07-02 at 12:23 -0400, Zhen Qian wrote:
> Branden:
> 
> Comments inline:
> 
> On Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:39:42 -0400, Branden Visser <branden at uwindsor.ca>
> wrote:
> > Hi all, I'm trying to grasp how synoptic tool ordering on a page is
> > supposed to be controlled.. here are some things I'm uncertain about:
> > 
> > 1. Are any of the QA servers running with the wsetup.home.toolids
> > properties? [1] If so, can someone copy/paste the configuration for me?
> > 
> I am not sure about the QA server settings.
> 
> > 2. Is the order of tools in wsetup.home.toolids supposed to affect the
> > vertical order of synoptic tools when added to a page?
> >
> 
> Yes. The saveFeatures function iterate through the home id list, and add
> synoptic tool into Home page if parent tool is found in site, e.g. add
> synoptic Schedule tool if Schedule tool is selected for the site.
> 

Ok, I think there is a bug in here. This is what I see:

1. Layout hints aren't being applied properly

1.1 For example: If you add announcements to a site, then the layout
hint 0,1 is applied regardless of the wsetup.home.toolids setting

1.2 Another example: If you add announcements *and* calendar to a site
in a single saveFeatures transaction, then the layout hints 0,1 and 1,1
are applied to the tools, in the tools' respective orders in
wsetup.home.toolids. This doesn't take into account all the tools in the
wsetup.home.toolids. This could result in newly-added synoptic widgets
erroneously appearing above other widgets that already existed.

2. Layout hints don't appear to be working in the first place. In both
examples above, those tools are actually just pushed to the bottom of
the order as they are added, despite the fact that the layout hints are
saying they should be at the top.

In qa3-us, I can see that whenever you add a tool, the synoptic widget
just gets stuff at the bottom of the list -- there is no consistency in
widget order.

Should I file bug reports for #1 or #2, or could I have something
configured wrong locally?

> > 3. Are the "layout hints" applied to a tool on a page supposed to affect
> > the *vertical* order in the page? There seems to be another ordering
> > mechanism that strictly over-rides this (i.e., the ordering function in
> > the admin 'Sites' tool)
> 
> There are two types of layout defined int SitePage.java: single column and
> double column. The layout hint value is (row, column) based. By default,
> the home tool is double-column layout and synoptic tools would appear in
> the right column (column index=1). 
> 
> Admin users can use the Sites tool to control page layout and order of the
> tools in Home page. For example, he can change the Home tool to be single
> column. However, if a parent tool is dropped and re-added (e.g.
> Announcement tool), the corresponding synoptic tool is added back according
> to the default layout, i.e. the Home page becomes double-column layout now,
> with the synoptic Announcement tool at the top of the right column. I am
> not sure whether this is a bug or not.
> 
> HTH,
> 
> - Zhen  
> 

Thanks,
Branden