[Owncloud] URL shortening

[Christian Reiner]

Hi all, 
let me just add a remark or two, since I am the author of the 'Shorty' app: 

On Tuesday 06 November 2012 16:31:26 Michael Grosser wrote:
> I actually think it's better to have that as a separate app. The
> shorty app is quite alright and has a lot of features someone with a
> short link wants.
> It's not only about the link size, but also tracking, reassigning
> shortened urls etc.
> Shorty is already providing that, I think the thing to do is just
> enabling a shorten with shorty option within sharing, not sure if the
> shorty app can do that with the new sharing api, I'm not that code
> aware with the sharing api...

an integration of Shorty into the sharing feature of owncloud is something I 
was indeed asked about. Unfortunately all my attempts into that direction did 
not really provide a satisfying result. 
I am currently unable to invest time into that, I am afraid. I would love to, 
but I have other things to do right now... So if anyone wants to step forward 
and give it a try that would be great! Currently Shortys source is not inside 
github but in a subversion repository of mine. There are various reasons for 
this, but that certainly is something that can be sorted out. 

My suggestion would be to keep things as simple as possible. The current 
sharing feature provides two important aspects: a) it generates URLs to access 
items, and Shorty is dealing with URLs. Fine. b) it takes care of a fine 
grained rights management, Shorty in contrast does not do this (double this) 
and there are good reasons for that. So in my eyes the best would be to leave 
sharing as it works, except for adding a small logic that integrates the 
Shorty feature into the sharing dialog. Something like this: if an item is 
shared (however), an additional option "create Shorty" is offered. This calls 
and fills the "New Shorty" dialog already present in the Shorty app in the 
same way the 'Shortlet' already does from outside. This way the internal 
rights management is not in danger of being bypassed. If an object is unshared 
the still existing Shorty resolves to a denial. 
Unfortunately the Share API does not provide such feature of an additional 
option in the sharing dialog. So if we are talking about an app-centric 
approach the only solution I see is to inject the option into the html markup 
by means of js. THis should work, though it is not exactly a bulletproof 
approach, since the markup of the sharing dialog might change. I would suggest 
to provide such feature as an additional plugin to Shorty, just as the 'Shorty 
Tracking' plugin already enhances Shortys features. Such additional plugin 
should be implemented such that it an handle different layouts of the sharing 
dialog being present. This way it is up to the local user (admin) if such 
integration is enabled or not. 

Christian Reiner (arkascha)
-- 
Christian Reiner (arkascha)
[ foss at christian-reiner.info ]