Forum OpenACS Development: Order of notifications in a batched notification

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1: Order of notifications in a batched notification
Posted by Caroline Meeks on 01/22/03 10:46 PM
In a batched notification the user is given a list of notifications in the previous hour/day/etc....e.g. a series of forum messages.

Should the most recent be on top or the oldest?

Use case from Sloan:

For forum messages it would be confusing to have a reply then later on the original message.  Thus Sloan presents messages the same way Yahoo groups does...with the posts shown in the order they were posted.  Thus oldest is on top.

Currently the code in OACS has the newest on the top, perhaps because no one has thought to put the order by in yet or perhaps for some reason.

Does anyone have a use case that needs to be supported for having the notifications listed in the reverse of the order they were generated?

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2: Re: Order of notifications in a batched notification (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 01/22/03 11:00 PM
OK since your first e-mail (which didn't explain quite as clearly what was happening) I've looked at your comments in the ticket you submitted for SloanSpace V2.

It does look like you folks made a minor change to the order by clause in SSV2's sources that didn't get picked up in the OpenACS tree.  Jeff may've missed it on a merge or it may well have been added after he did his merge.

I'll wait for other comments but now with this crystal clear explanation I think you're right, that there's no reason to want to be presented them in the current order, it makes the forums notifications ugly.

And if the order by clause isn't covering date already (whether ascending or descending) there's no guarantee of order anyway, add a bunch more data and Oracle may start spitting them out in random order which would never make sense.

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3: Re: Order of notifications in a batched notification (response to 1)
Posted by Lamar Owen on 01/23/03 06:23 AM
The last notification mail I received was in fact in random order -- the order made absolutely no sense.