Category:DatastoreRedesign

Journal

• Main view shows actions: Wrote a document, Draw a sunrise, Took photographs about my birthday, Copied ABC from USB ...

• An action encapsulates the full state of an activity at the time of creating the entry. It is composed of metadata properties and can contain several objects (files/documents). Resuming an action resumes the activity. Actions can be shared synchronously (that is, the activity is resumed and shared).

• An object is composed of a file and metadata (including mime type etc). Objects are versioned. It can asynchronously be shared on "bulletin boards". It can be opened in any activity handling its type.

• the clipboard holds objects, not actions. The clipboard basically is a bulletin board local to the user.

• May be needed an object view? Possibly for advanced users.

• Actions are grouped as versions of one more generic action. An action can be root or can be based on an existing one.

• Objects are also related to other versions of one more generic object. Do we want to expose this in the Journal?

• Actions and objects are immutable, but have some properties that refer to them and those can be changed: tags, description, starred, ...? Actions never drop off the Journal, but if the corresponding object is missing, they are grayed out and can only be resumed after the missing object has been retrieved from backup.

• Full text search operates on metadata (both from actions and objects) and on the content of some objects (those we can extract text from).

• Removable devices such as USB sticks and SD cards would stop appearing inside the journal and instead would use a simpler view that would allow to transfer files into and from the journal.

See Designs/Journal for some mockups of the new Journal.

Activities

• Most activities will save just one object inside one action, so these need to be able to use the existing super-simple API.

• Other activities will want to use a more complex API for:
  • storing several objects inside the same action,
  • editing the metadata of the action and objects,
  • influence the display of the action in the journal?
  • ...

Datastore

Let's first agree on the Journal and Activities sections before working on this one.