[ckan-dev] History pages

Mon Mar 11 10:36:52 UTC 2013

Hey,

Personally I'm leaning towards having only activity streams in the UI.
I just think the purposes of the activity and history pages are too
similar, maybe exactly the same, and activity streams could easily be
extended to include the extra features that history has, rather than
adding the history pages back in.

I think we would need to add to activity streams:

- A link somewhere on each activity that takes you to an 'activity
  detail' page showing exactly what changed, equivalent to a revision
  page.

  It was always the plan for activity streams to support this eventually
  and there's something in the model called an 'activity detail' for it
  but it was never implemented. The idea was for it to give a more user-
  friendly description of the change, rather than a diff.

  Note that each activity has a revision_id (in the activity model) so a
  quick and dirty way to implement this would be to add a link on each
  activity to the corresponding revision page, this would be only a
  template change.

- Links to view old versions of datasets somewhere on the activity
  streams (maybe on the activity detail pages, to reduce noise in the
  activity stream)

- Site-wide /activity page, like the /revision page.

- With the history pages you can pick any two revisions and compare
  them. This could be done in a similar way with activities, but I'm not
  sure how useful this feature is and whether we want it, given how much
  it would clutter up the UI?

On Fri, Mar 08, 2013 at 03:45:14PM +0100, Dominik Moritz wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'd like to discuss the history pages/ revisions pages in CKAN. 
> 
> We used to have history pages in CKAN and the pages still exist in the
> old templates [1]. With the new activity streams (i.e. [2]), we have a
> similar feature but in my opinion slightly different use cases. Also,
> we have the revisions [4] pages and .
> 
> I have apull request pending that replaces the old genshi templates
> with the new jinja templates at [3] for dataset history, group
> history, version differences and revisions. 
> 
> Now the question is how we integrate these into CKAN. As said before,
> we can say that these pages have been replaced by the activity
> streams. Another view on this is to say that both have their use cases
> and should both exist in CKAN. Sean suggested this is confusing
> because similar information is presented in multiple forms so he would
> not add the history to the dataset pages. He also suggested that the
> activity streams contain links to revisions so that one can see how a
> dataset looked at some point in the past. 
> 
> In my option, the activity streams offer a clean way to see what
> happened in the past but they to provide a way to see what has changed
> and how versions compare to each other. Especially in the case of
> groups the activity streams show what happened to the datasets in this
> group and not only what happened to the group itself. 
> 
> Okay, nuff input. The questions I would like to ask you are:
> 
> - Do we still want /revision and /revision/<REVISION>?  - Do we want
> /group/history/<GROUP> for group history?  - Do we want
> /dataset/history/<DATASET> for dataset history?  - Do we want
> /revision/diff/<STUFF> for comparing different revisions of a group or
> dataset?  - What are the advantages of activity streams over history
> pages? and vice versa?  - Should the activity stream link to the diff
> of a change instead of the latest version of a dataset/group?  - Is
> this email too long?
> 
> What are your opinions?
> 
> Cheers, Dominik
> 
> 
> [1]
> http://master.ckan.org/dataset/history/update-ppm-tb-dots-treatment-and-microscopic-centres-edo-state
> [2]
> http://master.ckan.org/dataset/activity/update-ppm-tb-dots-treatment-and-microscopic-centres-edo-state
> [3] https://github.com/okfn/ckan/pull/567 [4]
> http://master.ckan.org/revision
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