[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Examples objects support for activities.

[Martin Abente]

Hello Everyone:

In a recent conversation with Walter, he mentioned that it would be very
useful if activities could include examples objects. From my experience in
the field, I can tell this feature can be a really useful indeed. Therefore
I would like to bring this idea to the general discussion and see what
others think.

The idea is  simple: Activities include examples objects that can be
bundled with and accessed from the activity.

For the ones that also think this could be useful: I am sure you must have
your own vision of how this feature should work and look like, so please
share it here.

In general terms and from my POV it should be something:

(a) simple to access.
(b) with a familiar interface to the users.
(c) low-cost for activities developers to include.
(d) Safe.

One of the ideas, that meets these requirements, is to include a standard
"Examples" folder in the activities root directory that would be accessible
through a regular ObjetChooser. The ObjectChooser is already capable of
presenting any folder's contents, thanks to recent years improvement in the
journal to present external-media and documents-folder contents.

Accessing to these objects would be as easy as just opening a ObjectChooser
instance, many activities already do this (but limited to journal content).
As I just said, the ObjectChooser interface is widely used, therefore users
are already familiar with it. To ease the costs for activities developers I
think that having this standard folder approach is crucial. One open
question I still have is how this ObjectChooser should  be opened from the
activities in a standard way (suggestions?). By "safe" I mean that it
should guarantee that it only presents this standard folder objects in
read-only mode (at least from the GUI POV).

I will stop here and I would like to hear what you guys think regarding the
general idea first.

Saludos.
tincho.
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