[Building Sakai] resources entity Broker development

[Jim Eng]

Hi Adam,

We did a partial implementation of an EB for resources a couple years ago as part of the DOCS project.  The source code is in contrib:

	https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib//resources/rsf/trunk/

The work was tracked in JIRA:

	https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/DOCS

Entity Broker has a pretty big mismatch with Sakai's original Entity system, in that it's very hard to map the sakai entity id's or reference strings into the numerical id's used by EB.  That is especially true in Content Hosting because the entity id's contain information about the nesting of resources within folders, possibly several levels deep.  We used a hack to overcome that problem, which might help you if you run into a similar problem. 

Our implementation using EB was done to support browser-based rendering of a tool which was intended to have many of the capabilities of the velocity-based resources tool.  You'll find other hacks in there.  For example, if I recall correctly, the actions that users do on resources do not map directly to the CRUD actions supported by EB, so we used an EB implementation to represent actions available to a particular user with respect to a particular resource.  Not pretty, as I recall. 

It's been a long time since I looked at this code, but I will answer specific questions about it if asked. 

I hope the copyrights and licenses are up to date in the source files.  Our view is that this code was developed like code in sakai core and belongs to the community, so you are welcome to use any of it as you would any code in sakai core.  If it is useful to you, feel free to copy files to your project under that license.  If you want to take over this project, we can arrange that.  

As I recall, the project used a bit of RSF for rendering HTML pages and/or fragments on the server, and it used jquery and fluid for ajax and browser-side rendering.  I think the licenses for that code should not be a problem, and I do not recall any other dependencies that would create a problem. 

Thanks.

Jim

 


On Jan 10, 2012, at 6:54 AM, Adrian Fish wrote:

> The stuff I did was in SAK-20698. I don't have any outstanding commits 
> to make.
> 
> Cheers,
> Adrian.
> 
> On 10/01/2012 11:49, Adam Marshall wrote:
>> I got no response at all about this. Has there really been no recent work on the Resources EB API?
>> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:sakai-dev-
>>> bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Adam Marshall
>>> Sent: 03 January 2012 16:17
>>> To: dev sakai
>>> Subject: [Building Sakai] resources entity Broker development
>>> 
>>> We are just about to embark on a Resources Entity Broker API (incl. Citations)
>>> and I just wanted to check that we know about all previous work.
>>> 
>>> I see
>>> 
>>> https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-21211
>>> 
>>> https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-20698
>>> 
>>> https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-15196 - citations
>>> 
>>> Q1 - are there any other related Jiras?
>>> 
>>> Q2 - has anybody done any work not included above / not committed?
>>> 
>>> Adam
>>> 
>>> 
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> 
> -- 
> ==================================
> Adrian Fish
> Software Engineer
> B66 Management School
> Lancaster University
> Lancaster
> LA1 4YW
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