[daisy] A lot of questions.

[Bruno Dumon]

On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 10:44 +0200, Josué Alcalde González wrote:
> Hello, my name is Josué Alcalde and I am new in this list. I work in
> CSA, a company in Burgos, Spain. We are going to develop a Document
> Management System based on Daisy CMS. 

Great!

> 
> First of all, I am translating and skinnig Daisy, to make it suitable
> for my client. We will contribute the translation to Spanish as soon as
> it is finished.
> 
> Most of features we need are covered by Daisy, but we also need new
> features.
> - Workflow
> - Hierarchical structure for documents
> 
> I have read that in a few weeks, Daisy will have a Workflow
> implementation based on jBMP. I would like to have more details and I
> would like to collaborate if it is posible.

Basically the workflow comes down to this:

 * jbpm is embedded in the repository server

 * defining workflows is done directly using jbpm's 'jpdl' language

 * a workflow definition will be extended with some Daisy specific
metadata, to define things such as:
      - localized name and description for the workflow
      - when is the workflow applicable (defines based on document
        and current user, which workflows can the user can start)
      - for each task in the workflow:
           - localized labels for the task itself and the
             transitions
           - required input variables (with info such as name,
             type, localized label & help, possible selection
             list, that sort of stuff)

 * a set of java interfaces, independent of jbpm, will be defined for
interacting with the workflow component, as well as an HTTP+XML
interface, thus just like for the rest of the repository server

 * association of workflow instances with daisy document/s

 * GUI additions to the wiki (for starting a new workflow, a 'my tasks'
screen, task details screen, ...)

 * reporting (number of open tasks for each user, tasks which are not
completed after their due-date, ...)

 * some standard workflows (a 'generic task' workflow, a review
workflow, ...)

 * other things to take care of: access control on workflows/tasks, task
assignment & task pooling, email notifications, a javascript based task,
documentation

Based on how well the progress goes, less or more might be done, but
this should give some idea of what we're up to.

Maybe this is too technical or not technical enough for you, feel
welcome to share your ideas about this topic too.

> 
> About the hierarchical structure I would like to ask how could it be
> implemented.
> I thought about implementing a new document type" called "Folder" which
> could include other documents (and, of course), other "Folders", and
> modify the others documents to have a multi-value field to select the
> folder.
> I would have to make some or lots of modifications and I haven't got
> enough time to understand Daisy structure completely. I would like to
> ask if you think this is a good way, or if you would make another
> modifications.

I think this is a good approach. Be sure to associate the documents with
the folders, not the other way around, as otherwise this would require
to edit/update the folder document each time you want to add a document
to it.

I don't know what exactly you refer to with "I would have to make some
or lots of modifications" -- all this should be doable just by defining
document types, doctype specific XSLs, and publisher requests. In other
words, a bit of configuration.

I also suggest you have a look into the hierarchical fields of Daisy
2.0.

You could create a hierarchical link type field and use the
"Query/link-based selection list for hierarchical fields", this is a
hierarchical selection list which can be build up by means of your
Folder documents.

To display the documents in each folder (when viewing a Folder-type
document), define a custom publisher request for the Folder document
type that does a query for all documents contained by it.

[ it sounds like this use-case would serve as a nice tutorial on these
features, in case someone has some writing ambitions ;-) ]

> And finally, a question about development version. Is it stable enough
> to use a snapshot? Is there any roadmap to see when there will be new
> releases?

While there are a couple of known bugs (see jira), it should be quite
stable in terms of not-crashing and data-consistency (we've deployed a
2.0-snapshot for a customer of us too).

There's no roadmap with release dates right now. A first milestone has
been postponed for at least after the workflow.

-- 
Bruno Dumon                             http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center
bruno at outerthought.org                          bruno at apache.org