Activities and desktop events - Results from the meeting

[Sebastian Trüg]

*Caution: I am cross-posting - please use "reply-all"*

So yesterday we had a small meeting on activities and the saving of
desktop events. Let me give a very rough overview of the topic:

- The current activity manager links a resource directly to the current
  activity when the resource is reported via a DBus call which needs to
  be made by the application.
- There also is a Nepomuk service which also has a DBus interface to
  report opening and closing of files but it does not link to
  activities but creates desktop events, saving a timestamp and the
  type of the event.
- We have the NUAO (Nepomuk User Action) ontology which provides the
  necessary entities to describe file open/save events. This is what
  the nepomuk service uses.
- The scope of the meeting was: how to merge the two services.


Present (and actively discussing) at the meeting were (in no particular
order):

- Ivan Cucic
- Chani
- Marco Martin
- Evgeny (Phreedom) Egorochkin
- and myself


These are the decisions that were taken:

- The current activity manager's DBus interface will be extended to
  include methods to start a new readonly resource access event, to
  report saving of the resource, and to close the event (parameters are
  always: resource URI, application/service ID, and window ID).
- The activity manager will not link resources directly to activities
  but rather create NUAO event resources and relate those to the
  current activity.
- We will have a nice API for app developers to use (draft of
  ResourceAccess is attached.) This class can be implemented in a
  synchronous or asynchronous manner without changing the API since the
  calling application does not care about when the data has actually we
  written.
- The NUAO ontology will be modified slightly to include the save
  timestamps attached to an event.
- We will add restricted support for non-KDE apps like OpenOffice or
  Acroread or whatever through KRun (and hopefully even Konsole - I
  would love that) using a dedicated DBus method which creates events
  of lower priority in the service (meaning they are overwritten by a
  call from the application itself). A good place to start is all
  places where KRecentFiles is updated.


Hoping that I did not forget anything important I now open the floor to
the "who does what" discussion. :)
In playground[1] you can find the code for my Nepomuk service which also
contains the code for creating the NUAO events. In there is a rather
hacky attampt to "merge" events from places like KRun and the apps
themselves. IMHO there is room for improvement there.

Cheers,
Sebastian

[1]
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/base/nepomuk-kde/datamaintenanceservice/datamaintenanceservice.cpp?view=markup
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: resourceaccess.h
Type: text/x-c
Size: 1472 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20100721/c7bcdd64/attachment.bin