[Sugar-devel] View Source

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 22.11.2008, at 16:35, Simon Schampijer wrote:

> Some great work has been going into this release regarding the 'View
> source' support. The source of all the activities can be shown, and
> browse does still support showing the source of the document.
>
> === sugar-toolkit ===
> * Add view-source-related methods HandleViewSource and GetDocumentPath
>
> === sugar ===
> * Implement a global handler for the view source key

Since I could not find any discussion, let alone documentation about  
this, I (again) got out my rusty Emacs, fed it with some grep'ed  
source files, and reverse-engineered the whole thing. My findings are  
here:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Low-level_Activity_API#D-Bus_Methods

I like the idea so far, but here are the issues I have with the  
current implementation:

1. HandleViewSource should return a boolean to indicate whether the  
request was handled or not.
    This would also get rid of the Python-specific dbus error handling  
code in viewsource.py because handle_view_source in activity.py could  
simply answer False.

2. GetDocumentPath is a poor name for what it does.
    It should contain "source" because it's not the document that is  
viewed, but its source. How about GetSourcePath()?
    Also, this file is deleted unconditionally when the source view is  
closed. I'd add a boolean "transfer_ownership" flag to indicate that  
it's okay to delete (similar to the datastore API).
    Also, what kinds of source does this support? I noticed the  
Browser's HTML source was highlighted. Is that determined by the file  
name extension?

On a more general note, activityservice.py should be annotated with  
the actual DBus signatures.

- Bert -