UI improvements future plans

On 23.05.2018 we have had a workshop where we discussed the proposed features. Even though the general feedback was positive and none of the features was rejected, there's still a lot of work to do to take the effort to the production-grade level.

Below is the proposed mind-map with possible further steps that we could take (the source XMind file is also attached).

UI improvements.xmind

Rough effort estimation

Below can be found a table with description and coarse estimates of the possible further steps (time-wise* and priority-wise**).

* (Time-wise the tasks are estimated relatively to Aleksandr Pchelintcev, i.e. if the assignee of the issue wasn't fiddling with the UI thoroughly lately, some time has to be added to get in the context.)

** (Priority-wise the tasks go from the brightest ... ... to the coldest )

New features

Name	Description:	Estimate	Resurface?	Delivery
Rest integration	Develop an alternative to JCR for browsing and form viewing/editing. See the synergy with the REST client (or use some other approach). Goal - to have easily configurable REST browser and REST-based forms MGNLUI-4439 - Getting issue details... STATUS	13	No	Validate foundation, APIs before next major. Ship with new major of REST Client any time.
Cross-field validation support	The field hierarchy is now kept in the form binders, so technically it is available while form is active and could be injectable in the validators and/or fields themselves. Need to see how to better expose such hierarchy and how to address at least some of the issues related to the topic. Timebox to 13 SP, possible followed by smaller efforts. DEV-920 - Getting issue details... STATUS Enables: MGNLUI-2542 - Getting issue details... STATUS	13	No	Before 6.0 because new APIs are introduced.
Forms with alternative layout	Ship 1-2 alternative ways to layout forms (the API's are in place, even some implementation has started)	3-5 days
Validation within composite fields	Re-use 'validation bubble' effort from the past, try to provide universal validation/description UI regardless of the layout	1 week (though be trickier)
[optional] Master-detail sub-app	Test the flexibility of the new UI framework views and combine browser and detail in one sub-app (should be as easy as binding the pre-created form to the current selection in e.g. tree view)	3-5 days
[optional] Filterable columns in Grids	The PoC solution contains column renderer which allows to filter tree grid by path. Consider productising such feature and see how would it be possible to incorporate it into configuration and implementation of the content views.	1-2 weeks

Essential features

Name	Description	Estimate
Chooser dialog	DEV-974 - Getting issue details... STATUS	1-2 weeks
Multi-value field UI	DEV-976 - Getting issue details... STATUS	1 week
Migrate more fields	DEV-978 - Getting issue details... STATUS	3 weeks (can be parallelised tho)
Port more column renderers	DEV-977 - Getting issue details... STATUS	1-2 weeks (can be parallelised)
Harden JCR browsing implementation	(remaining DS configuration, full-text search support etc)	1-2 weeks
Multi-selection support in browser	ValueContext needs generalisation (to conveniently cover the single vs multi selection cases)	3-5 days
Harden DS observation mechanism	ContentChangeEvent replacement needs to be hardened: should be memory-leak safe, should be clear, corner-cases should be considered. Observation should also work for the case of the detail sub-app	1-2 weeks
Re-instate previews in actionbar	Re-add the feature (should be simple with ValueContext). Question the abstraction of ImageProvider.	3-5 days
Shortcuts in the grids and forms	Currently not ported over from the old implementation. Need to see also how to do it better.	3-5 days
Port form-dialog	Thanks to the view-contexts and view improvements it is probably possible to make a form dialog implementation that shares most of the code with the detail sub-app, still requires quite some work.	1-2 weeks
Implement Vaadin 8 - based inline row editing	Grid/TreeGrid has in-built editor API, which can play together with parts of the from framework improvements that we introduced (binders/propertysets etc). Add support for inline editing in Grid/TreeGrid	1-2 weeks

Migration strategy

Name	Description	Estimate
App descriptor migration	Think of a strategy (special sub-app that takes an old descriptor and translates to the new or some hybrid descriptor). Consider migrating whatever is easily migrated (fields, columns etc).	2-3 weeks
Legacy action support	It seems to be fairly sufficient to expose the selection context a set of JcrNodeAdapter to make some UI actions work. See how many we can cover by this and what is needed to cover more.	1-2 weeks

Configuration

Name	Description	Estimate
Content type powered config	Requires content type solution to be available. Would be nice to shave some config parts off the detail sub-app and form dialogs.	1 week (once content types are in)
Apply the type references where possible	New UI improvements do not make the descriptors any leaner as is (in order to not make the configuration less powerful). With type references for whatever possible we could mitigate this fact.	2-2.5 weeks

Actions

Name	Description	Estimate
Re-start async action effort	Use Java 8 instead of Quartz. Try to ship the asynchronous-ness as a trait/mix-in of an action, not as some base abstract class	2 weeks

Misc

Name	Description	Estimate
Unit testing	The effort is almost not covered by unit tests (the state of the API and implementation was fluctuating too much so far)	3 weeks (+ maybe more since we'll need even more tests before final release)
UI tests	See if it would be possible to re-use the UI tests for our own apps when they are ported to the new framework	2 weeks
UI push support	finally incorporate Vaadin's push support	1 week

Unknown unknowables

There are probably bugs in the new UI implementation, maybe there will be potential blockers even. I can't estimate that, but I'd add at least 2.5-3 weeks for that on top of the total estimate.

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