About action handlers

[Laurent-Walter Goix]

Hi all,

I read the actions draft that looks promising, but have some questions regarding the different handlers:

- HttpActionHandler: the example mentions the "DIALOG" target, which is not currently formally defined in the list. Would it make sense to formally define it as i find it valuable/quite common (sounds like it opens a popup window right?)? in alternative it would be useful to use one of the formal ones.
- IntentActionHandler: it is not clear to me from the example how this information would be processed. in particular, i am missing the actual "intent" to be launched. it is supposed to be mapped from the action name (in this case "share") that each platform will map it internally to the most appropriate intent? Some claryfying text would be useful.


In general in the AS 2.0 data model would it be reasonable to also allow actions to be actually described in a separate document (still according to the action draft) and get downloaded separately. it may save bandwidth as actions/handlers may be chatty and may also be quite static for some objectTypes (whilst it's clear to me that in some cases it may vary per activity). section 3.6.1 of the as2.0 draft could further say:
"In alternative, the "actions" property may be expressed in the form of a URI where the actual value (containing the list of activities) can be accessed. This may be particularly useful to save bandwidth in the context of static "actions" for some objects."

cheers
walter

[James M Snell]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 5:14 AM, Laurent-Walter Goix
<laurentwa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I read the actions draft that looks promising, but have some questions
> regarding the different handlers:
>
> - HttpActionHandler: the example mentions the "DIALOG" target, which is not
> currently formally defined in the list. Would it make sense to formally
> define it as i find it valuable/quite common (sounds like it opens a popup
> window right?)? in alternative it would be useful to use one of the formal
> ones.

Yes, this is drawn from a set of use cases stemming out originally
from things like OpenSocial, where some applications need the ability
to display the results of an action within a dialog style window. The
targets that I included in the draft, however, are largely tentative..
intended to get something down and functional until we figure out the
correct set of specific definitions we want.

> - IntentActionHandler: it is not clear to me from the example how this
> information would be processed. in particular, i am missing the actual
> "intent" to be launched. it is supposed to be mapped from the action name
> (in this case "share") that each platform will map it internally to the most
> appropriate intent? Some claryfying text would be useful.
>

This space intentionally left blank :-) ... I'm still working on
figuring out everything that's going to be required for the intent
action handler. Essentially, the purpose of the IntentActionHandler is
to say, "There's some external bit of code (i.e. a native app) that
can handle this action, take the containing object and pass it off to
that code for processing"

>
> In general in the AS 2.0 data model would it be reasonable to also allow
> actions to be actually described in a separate document (still according to
> the action draft) and get downloaded separately. it may save bandwidth as
> actions/handlers may be chatty and may also be quite static for some
> objectTypes (whilst it's clear to me that in some cases it may vary per
> activity). section 3.6.1 of the as2.0 draft could further say:
> "In alternative, the "actions" property may be expressed in the form of a
> URI where the actual value (containing the list of activities) can be
> accessed. This may be particularly useful to save bandwidth in the context
> of static "actions" for some objects."
>

+0.75 :-) ... In some cases this makes sense, in others, the action
handler itself may require some bit of context from the containing
activity stream object in order to make any sense. Including actions
by reference could work but we'd just need to be careful how we handle
the context (it's not a terribly difficult problem by any means)

> cheers
> walter

Appreciate you taking a look! More feedback is very welcome!

- James

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