[deepamehta-devel] Upcoming DM 4.5: extended collaboration and privacy

[mre at deepamehta.de]

Hi dear jri!

Regarding the 4.5 release, I would really appreciate if you can find some
time answer my following questions:

1 please explain a bit more about the relation of a Workspace to Topic and
Assocation Types (in 4.5) in general

2 especially i would be interested for my plugins who build on / extend
the functionality of the dm4-webclient for end-users

2.1 I wonder for which of my custom topic (and association) types
end-users will have a "Create" Permission and how not?

2.2 What happens when users edit topics or associations (within the
dm4-webclient) which already have an (automatic) assignment to a specific
workspace (by my plugin) but the user has selected some different workspace
in the dm4-webclient menu? What happens then to the workspace assignments
of my topics, are they overwritten by the update request (carrying a
different workspace id in the cookie)? How will a plugin developer be able
to control the workspace assignment for topics of certain types and for the
user (who works from within the dm4-webclient dm4-webclient)?

2.3 Will users still be able to edit child topics (of types which have no
workspace assignment at all, as it is now in most cases when introducing
custom types in third party plugins)?

3 also i am curious: what happens exactly if i use the assignWorkspace (of
the WorkspaceService) method in my plugin and the object i pass in already
has an assignment to another workspace?

4 if you could announce some sort of api-freeze before the 4.5 release,
that would be very nice to have (so i have some time to adapt other
plugins)

Thank you very much for help & nice greets!



On Sat, 13 Dec 2014 22:17:27 +0100, Jörg Richter <jri at deepamehta.de>
wrote:
> Dear developers,
> 
> DM's basic infrastructure for collaboration was already laid down in
> version 4.0.12 (more than 2 years ago) but there were serious lacks:
> 	- The Access Control Lists that govern the sharing were not
configurable
> 	by the user. There was no GUI to do that.
> 	- The Webclient GUI had weak support for the Workspaces despite DM's
> 	workspaces are a central concept when it comes to sharing.
> 
> The highlight feature of upcoming DM 4.5 will be revised collaboration
> features and true privacy. For the first time a DM installation can hold
> private and shared data at the same time.
> 
> Instead of requiring the user to laboriously configure the Access
Control
> settings on a per-topic/association basis DM 4.5 comes with an extended
> Workspace concept. Each workspace will have a "Sharing Mode" to let the
> user control how (if at all) the content of that workspace is accessible
by
> others. Thus in DM 4.5 each topic/association automatically inherits its
> Access Control settings from the workspace-level.

...


> For the developer Access Control is mostly transparent. It is just
> enforced by the Core. The developers uses the DM APIs just like before,
> with some differences:
> 	- When accessing a single object the current user has no access to an
> 	exception is thrown and (in case of a RESTful API) an error response is
> 	generated.
> 	- When accessing a collection of objects the Core filters out the
objects
> 	the current user has no access to.
> 
> More details about the new Access Control concept are described in this
> ticket:
> https://trac.deepamehta.de/ticket/592
> 
> You can already test all this features with the current SNAPSHOT
release:
> http://download.deepamehta.de/deepamehta-4.5-SNAPSHOT-20141213.zip
> 
> There are still issues. However I would appreciate your feedback very
much.
> 
> DM 4.5 is scheduled for the end of this year.
> 
> Cheers,
> Jörg