RRFW Working Draft: Messaging subsystem

Status: pending implementation. Date: Jun 30 2004. Last revised:

Introduction

Due to the modular and flexible architecture of RRFW, nothing prevents us from having the possibility of user messages displayed in RRFW pages. This design document describes the concept of this functionality.

Description

The messaging subsystem will allow the RRFW users to leave comments and short messages directly at the RRFW pages. Those may be remarks about the graph contents, troubleshooting journal, etc.

Each user is uniquely identified by RRFW ACL susbsystem. We introduce several new attributes and privileges for messaging functionality. Privilege objects are the tree names.

Attributes:

• email

  The user's e-mail where the notifications will be sent

• msgnotify

  When set to true value, e-mail notifications will be sent to this users.

Privileges:

• PostMessages

  allows the user to add messages to the tree objects.

• DisplayMessages

  allows the user to see all messages for the tree

• ReceiveNotifications

  allows the user to receive e-mail notifications. For those notifications generated by Messages, DisplayMessages must be granted too.

• DeleteMessages

  allows the user to delete messages from the tree objects

• EditMessages

  allows the user to change any message

• EditOwnMessages

  allows the user to change his/her own messages

The acledit program will have two additional options that simplify administration: --msguser will grant all privileges except DeleteMessages and EditMessages, and --msgadmin will grant all messaging privileges.

The messaging options database will contain parameters that each user can tune for himself or herself:

• Notify when

  a) any new message in all trees; b) (default) new message for objects that I commented only.

• Notification format

  a) plain text (default); b) HTML; c) RSS 2.0

• Subject line format

  The format pattern with keywords like $TREE, $PATH, $AUTHOR, $MSGID, etc.

  Default:

    [rrfw $MSGID] $TREE $AUTHOR: $PATH

Each message will have the status of Read/Unread per each user in the system.

On the tree chooser page in RRFW Web interface, the user will be shown the unread messages.

RRS 2.0 feed will be provided for messages export and for integration with other messaging systems.

Author

Copyright (c) 2004 Stanislav Sinyagin <ssinyagin@k-open.com>