Forum OpenACS Q&A: Status of Curriculum module?

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Posted by Ola Hansson on
Hi all!

I happen to like the idea of the curriculum module very much and would
like to add it to my site.
However, the module doesn't handle abstract urls witch is a real pain.
It's unclear if the module has been ported and I dont know where to
file the bug/request in the SDM, so I figured I'd post here instead.

If my curriculum bar is made up of two elements (news and chat, say)
and a user clicks on news (s)he'll be brought to the news page and
that element will be checked and everything is fine. If, OTOH, a user
visits my chat section for the first time by following a link
elsewhere on my site (not the link on the curriculum bar) and that
link has an abstract reference (/chat/, or filename instead of
filename.tcl) the chat element on the bar won't be checked...It *will*
be checked if the user gets to news via an absolute url!

This is bad since I'd like to keep all links with abstract urls.

Can someone tell me if this is hard to fix?

If it's not I'd give it a try, given some pointers.

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Posted by Don Baccus on
Virtual URLs aren't handled well at all (with the exception of the couple of modules that are served by the user group serve routine) in older versions of the ACS, including 3.2, the ACS Classic (Oracle) version that OpenACS was ported from.

Short term ... well, how much work do you want to do?  It is possible you're seeing behavior unique to the OpenACS version, but probably not .  I've not used abstract URLs on my existing ACS 3x sites except in the "groupified" modules so can't be of any help in estimating how much work would be involved in implementing the behavior you want.

ACS 4.0 deals with abstract URLs from the ground up, so with this version this kind of behavior should go away.