[Sugar-devel] Latest release of Read Etexts, some questions

[Jim Simmons]

Tomeu,

By "sharing" I mean pretty much what the core Read Activity does when
it shares a book.  The person doing the sharing either uses the
drop-down on the Activity toolbar to share the book with the whole
neighborhood or goes to the neighborhood  view and invites an
individual to share the book.  The person or persons invited will see
a Read Etexts icon in their neighborhood view and can choose to join
it.  Once they do they will receive a copy of the book.  The file
being transferred will be a zip file containing both the book text and
a pickle file containing annotations and bookmarks, plus the title of
the original book in the Journal of the original user will be in the
same pickle file.

Here is the issue:  when someone receives a shared book he only gets a
file.  In the neighborhood view he will see "The Hound of the
Baskervilles by A. Conan Doyle" but the Activity itself doesn't seem
to be able to get that information.  He knows he has joined an
Activity of another user, but the title of the Activity that he saw in
the neighborhood view does not seem to be available to his own
Activity.  As a result, when the user receives the book his own
Journal entry will be named "Read Etexts Activity".  Of course he can
rename it later but it would be better if the received Journal entry
had the same name as the one sharing the book.

Now the Read Activity seems to get around this by using metadata
stored in the PDF it is sharing.  So it occurred to me that I could
include the title in my pickle file with the annotations and pass it
along that way.  This works, almost.

Finally we get to the real problem:  I need to know in my program if
the file I'm reading is an existing Journal entry, in which case I
leave the title alone, or if it has in the current session been
received from another user, in which case I want to change the title
of my own Journal entry to whatever is in the pickle file.

Now that I've written this all out it occurs to me that there might be
another way to do this that I haven't tried.  So I may yet figure this
out myself.  But I'm still interested in suggestions.

James Simmons


> When you say that the file is shared, what do you mean exactly?
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> James Simmons
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