Re: Category design issues

[rms39 columbia edu (Russell Steinthal)]

On Tue, 01 Jun 1999 13:12:57 CDT, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

>> I'd like to expand that to allow users to define categories.  
>> Initially, they will probably just have names and descriptions, 
but I
>> can envision adding things like color-coding or default priorities 
>> later; as a result, we'll need a way to store the category 
>> information, rather than just storing arbitrary strings.
>
>Well, we can store these arbitrary strings and just have GnomeCal
>include some configuration for these categories.

>For example "Holydays" could have a definition that goes "Set
>background of days to red", so that we can see, nicely marked those
>days in red :-).

Right.  Maybe I wasn't clear, but the vCal file will still contain 
arbitrary strings, since that's what the spec calls for.  GnomeCard 
will use a separate config file to map those strings to its own 
internal definitions (which can be shared with other GNOME apps as 
appropriate): for example, a priority boost (if I ever get my dynamic 
priority scheme coded), colors, etc.

>Now, regarding configuration files, I suggest we use gnome-xml for
>this information instead of the .ini-like file we have been using.

>Gnome-XML is mature enough to address our needs, and support
>arbirtarly complex structures (which is what we want here).
>
>Thing is: gnome-config is a simple system for loading/saving simple
>configuration items;  Anything more complex becomes hackish to deal
>with. 
>
>So we could have something like:
>
><gnome-pim:categories>
>   <category>
>     <builtin-name>Holydays</builtin-name>
>     <day-render background="purple">
>   </category>
>
>   <category>
>     <builtin-name>Birthday</builtin-name>
>     <day-render background="red" foreground="yellow">
>   </category>
></gnome-pim:categories>
>

Hmm... I'll need to read up on libXML.  Do we need to store the whole 
category file in memory, or can we query the file directly for items 
we want?  (I can see the category file growing fairly large, and it 
seems wasteful to have to store all that data in memory when only a 
handful of the categories will be used in any given calendar file).  
gnome-config handles this fairly well, as I see it...

-Russell


-- 
Russell Steinthal		Columbia Law School, Class of 2002
<rms39@columbia.edu>		Columbia College, Class of 1999
<steintr@nj.org>		UNIX System Administrator, nj.org

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