[OS3 Proposal] Refactor Albums/MediaItems Service into new Files Service

[James Snell]

I'm still working up the documentation on this particular item, but as
an evolution of the CMIS alignment work done this last year, for the
3.x timeframe, we should work to deprecate the existing
Album/MediaItems APIs in favor of a new generalized File API. I will
have a specific write up on this no later than midweek, but wanted to
make sure it was on the radar here.

[Mark W.]

Yep. There's a patch in some of the spec already. Not sure if we want a "file" api per se, but maybe, like you said, something closer to CMIS.

Also, Dan Dumont is working on a file upload patch for shindig. Whatever we do there should be consistent with these ideas.

[Laurent-Walter Goix]

indeed it seems the file upload topic is becoming hot both from the
spec and impl perspective.

from the mobile point of view most of the content/files envisioned (at
least based on current usages) is media. but of course any file
potentially could be uploaded especially if we consider mobile
business apps. the concept of structuring media in albums remind the
premises of UGC galleries and may actually not be widely used apart
from specific web sites. or at least it tends to be complex in upload
from mobile devices, whilst being more used for subsequent management/
organization and on traditional web interfaces and portals like
picasa, flickr or facebook.
thus i don't have a strong opinion whether updating this or not.
looking from spec & impl perspective though the fact of having 2
separate services make this quite complex to manage and probably
similar structures could be achieved/managed through a single service
(hopefully simplier than CMIS-full)

yet it would be very beneficial to support an official/standard way of
uploading content+metadata together in a single request, especially
from mobile. this should not prevent being able to upload them
separately neither and may be considered as a specific case of batch.
in addition, it would be useful to consider uploading files
contextually to activities, and not only as "separate" content. some
types of activities (especially those involving a "target"), cannot be
implied by a "simple" content upload (e.g. "oe posted a picture"). for
example pictures associated with a specific place typically need more
expressiveness. thus either the "new" Files service can accommodate
this type of use case, and/or the Activity service may be slightly
updated to accommodate it: mobile users typically want to upload a
picture without paying much attention to the specific album or so at
least at upload time, but they do want to decide whether this will go
on their wall or to a specific group or place (typically the ui will
guide them in this process)

Is this use case being considered for the evolution of this feature?
walter

[Mark W.]

Yes. Dan Dumont is putting some of the initial pieces together in shindig. We'll then try those out and build the spec around the lessons learned.

Here's a link to the code review: https://reviews.apache.org/r/3768/