Feature Proposal: Allow hierarchicy inside attachment folders

Motivation

This would make interaction with WebDAVPlugin (and ftp, etc.) more intutive.

Description

There are many times when I would like to attach many documents to a topic, but would like a more logical grouping than a flat folder allows. For instance, if a topic corresponds to a face-to-face meeting, one might like to attach documents characterized as PresentedMaterial, InformationalMaterial, etc. This gets more obvious when people are interacting with TWiki using WebDAV or ftp, where they are more used to such features. Creating a separate topic to achieve such separation is possible, but not a very friendly approach.

This makes TWiki much more accessible to people who are more used to share drives, etc. which is a large population in any corporate environment.

The attachment table could be modified to show this hierarchy in a visual manner. The usual ATTACHURL and PUBURL variables work as before, but refering to a document in a sub-folder will need to indicate the folder name.

-- PankajPant - 16 Jun 2005

Impact and Available Solutions

Note: Patch is attached as https://www.twiki.org/p/pub/Codev/HierarchicalAttachmentFolders/twiki-foo-bar-patch.diff. The patch is against the TWikiAlphaRelease of 15 Feb 2004.

Documentation

If necessary, user documentation of new features introduced by this proposal.

Examples

Example uses of features introduced by proposal.

Implementation

Any comments on how the feature is implemented or could be improved

Discussion:

One way to achieve this - part of the proposal at least - is to add a keyword field to the attachment table. When attaching, values for this field can be chosen from a dropdown box that is filled with a topic's bullet list for consistent values. The attachment table can then be sorted on keyword.

-- ArthurClemens - 16 Jun 2005

Why not just sort on the comment field?

-- CrawfordCurrie - 17 Jun 2005

That would be the cheapest solution, but then you would lose validated input.

A real life example comment might say: "Revision 1.1 after feedback dd. 12 June 2005". With keyword this would become "Presented Material - Revision 1.1 after feedback dd. 12 June 2005". Might work. Not sexy.

-- ArthurClemens - 17 Jun 2005

I think my original point was missed. Using comments (or even an extra keyword field) would work fine for anyone who is TWiki savvy, but we are trying to find a solution that works for the entire population.

We are looking into using the WebDAV based interface to improve the usability of the attachment table. Uploading/deleting/updating will all work until the first person to try creating a subfolder, and the whole MS shares vs. TWiki discussion resumes.

I should mention that we haven't done anything in this direction as yet ... just thinking about it. So if my assumptions about the WebDAV interface are not correct, please enlighten me.

-- PankajPant - 22 Jun 2005

And what are your assumptions about the WebDAV interface?

-- ArthurClemens - 22 Jun 2005

The WebDAVPlugin page states that "By opening a Web Folder on a TWiki directory, users can drag and drop attachments into the topic, and they will automatically be versioned and added to the topic attachment table." This would probably allow folders to be created in the attachment directory, but I'm not sure how the plugin would react. Even if it lets a user create a folder and dump files into it, I'm pretty sure that they won't show up in the TWiki attachment table. That's the part I'm trying to get to with this suggestion.

-- PankajPant - 23 Jun 2005