[ckan-dev] recline UX

[Rufus Pollock]

On 26 June 2012 08:21,  <p.romain at cg33.fr> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am wondering what can be the user experience when viewing a resource in
> CKAN.
> The visualisation offered by recline is great but for the average user it
> can lead to some surprise or incomprehension.

Just to note the Recline currently live in CKAN v1.7 is nearly 2
months old. Recline has seen extensive improvements in that time ;-)

> Firstly, if the resource is not in a csv format, it will only display a red
> line.

It isn't just CSV - it will try and do a bunch of other formats.

However, it would be nicer to just not display the preview section and
we have a ticket for this which is either done or nearly done:
<http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/2389>

> Wouldn't it be better to check the resource's format before display?

We already do that. The issue is what we do if we can't preview it.
Not showing the Preview I think would be better!

> On the resource metadata notice, there are 3 field to specify mime type.
> What are they used for ?

See: http://docs.ckan.org/en/ckan-1.7/domain-model-resource.html

The basic answer is that format is informal - e.g. can be "csv" --
which is not a valid mimetype. Meanwhile mimetype *must* be the
mimetype of the file. mimetype inner is for e.g. the case of a zipped
csv. I think we should probably hide this info from average users.

> The first one seems to display a format icon but the other 2 : what is the
> difference between type mime and type mime (inner) ?
>
> Secondly, if the format is csv is it possible to display polygons or points
> in the map view whatever the geographic projection ? By default it seems to
> work only for WGS84 coordinates, correct ?

Yes, I think that is correct. I don't know Leaflet's support for
projection so couldn't answer immediately as to support for other
projections.

> Thirdly, I followed the discussion about browser compatibilty. It works fine
> on IE9 but it doesn't seem to work on IE8. If IE6 and IE7 are slowly but
> surely disappearing, IE8 is there for some time and it would be great to
> assure compatibility with this browser. Backbone is compatible with this
> browser so maybe we could help in making a fix for recline.

If it doesn't work on IE8 in the *latest* Recline (see
http://reclinejs.com/ or https://github.com/okfn/recline please file
an issue https://github.com/okfn/recline/issues)

> Lastly, if no visualisation is available, have you thought about the
> possibility to attach an screenshot of the resource or an image illustrating
> it? When describing a resource of image type, it would be quite useful.

Good idea. We'd need something to take the screenshot though ...

Rufus