Forum OpenACS Improvement Proposals (TIPs): Re: TIP #133: Change "bio" from being generic storage in "person" to type-specific storage in "user".

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5: Re: TIP #133: Change "bio" from being generic storage in "person" to type-specific storage in "user". (response to 1)
Posted by Emmanuelle Raffenne on 05/30/09 12:47 PM
I approve with reserve about dropping the bio_mime_type column. It is actually used (not in core but in .LRN). Any text datatype can be potentially HTML, especially since we have HTML editors such as tinymce and xinha.

How would the mime type of "bio" be handled then?

Note: Regarding dynamic types, that reminds me association between attributes for a more complex semantic but that goes beyond what we want to get initially.

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6: Re: TIP #133: Change "bio" from being generic storage in "person" to type-specific storage in "user". (response to 5)
Posted by Don Baccus on 05/30/09 02:12 PM
Before suggesting dropping bio_mime_type I did the following in my complete checkout of all current openacs packages, "openacs-4-complete":

Goshawk:~ acs$ cd openacs-4-complete/packages
gGoshawk:packages acs$ grep -r -l bio_mime_type .
./acs-subsite/sql/postgresql/attribute.sql
./xotcl-core/tcl/05-db-procs.tcl
Goshawk:packages acs$

xotcl-core is Gustaf's kludge to ignore the attributes "bio" and "bio_mime_type" because his code doesn't handle attributes defined to use generic rather than type-specific storage.

acs-subsite/sql/postgresql/attribute.sql creates the bio_mime_type attribute.

Note: it isn't created for oracle so if it is really used somewhere in .LRN, it is somewhere that only supports PG, and is not in cvs.openacs.org:/cvsroot (unless it is in contrib, which I didn't check).

Are you guys using it locally?

bio should really use the rich text stuff regardless, I thought about making that change but it's more than I'm prepared to do right now.

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7: Re: TIP #133: Change "bio" from being generic storage in "person" to type-specific storage in "user". (response to 6)
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 05/30/09 02:46 PM
Don, i don't understand, why you are poking on xotcl-core. xotcl-core never claimed to support the externally stored attributes, so it simply excludes it. Most likely Malte's code for xo-dyntypes extends xotcl-core to handle it, but i did not have time to look at it.

It was rather a kludge at the first place to define bio this way. Don's suggestion to move it from persons to users and to turn it into a regular attribute makes perfectly sense.

Emma, the mime-type for the bio could be stored in the bio field together with the content (as two element list) by using the rich-text widget for editing. This is also a kind of a kludge, but used all over OpenACS.

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8: Re: TIP #133: Change "bio" from being generic storage in "person" to type-specific storage in "user". (response to 6)
Posted by Emmanuelle Raffenne on 05/30/09 02:46 PM
No, it's not my local, it's .LRN. But you are right, it doesn't use the "bio_mime_type", it doesn't even store it... It converts it from/to HTML each time it is edited (gross!).

So, yeah, dropping bio_mime_type won't hurt.

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9: Re: TIP #133: Change "bio" from being generic storage in "person" to type-specific storage in "user". (response to 7)
Posted by Don Baccus on 05/30/09 02:50 PM
I'm not "poking at it".

I grep'd to find all the uses of bio_mime_type, which is the right thing to do before removing it, no?

When I saw the xotcl-core reference, well, of course I wanted to look to see what you were doing with it.

And I stated above that you're kludging around the use of it.

Since that is all xotcl-core is doing with it, it is safe to get rid of it, i.e. I won't break xotcl-core by doing so.

Surely you don't prefer that I just remove stuff without first checking to make sure I won't break stuff like xotcl-core???

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10: Re: TIP #133: Change "bio" from being generic storage in "person" to type-specific storage in "user". (response to 7)
Posted by Emmanuelle Raffenne on 05/30/09 02:51 PM
Gustaf,

Yes, sounds like (more than) a bit of kludge to me. Having a proper datatype created in the DB for it would be much better.

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11: Re: TIP #133: Change "bio" from being generic storage in "person" to type-specific storage in "user". (response to 8)
Posted by Don Baccus on 05/30/09 02:52 PM
"It converts it from/to HTML each time it is edited (gross!)"

Yes, exactly. The behavior is totally bizarre and probably confusing to users.

I think we all agree that rich text is the right way to go, but I don't have time to do it right now.