Feature Proposal: Topic Reparenting Problems for Large Webs

Motivation

Reparenting a topic is a problem in very large webs.

Description and Documentation

The "more topic actions" page contains a complete pick-list of all the pages in the web, to be used to pick a new topic parent. For very large webs (many hundreds to a thousand pages) this takes too long, hangs browsers, and can't be navigated. Instead, provide a field to type in the new parent topic name.

Examples

Impact and Available Solutions

Implementation

-- Contributors: ChrisWestin

Discussion

-- ChrisWestin - 02 Mar 2007

I agree this can easily hog your browser. But having just a field requires the parenter to know the topics, either by head or by using a secondary page that lists the topics.

There is no one good solution, it depends on your situation.

A fancy solution would be to have a field and a link "show possible parents" to optionally fill a textarea dynamically. Need to know basis. This would require AJAX scripting.

More simple: create a link to a pop-up to a simple topic list that can be used to copy-paste into the parent input field.

-- ArthurClemens - 02 Mar 2007

Is it possible to do AJAX scripting with graceful fallback to current spec for browsers that have JavaScript disabled?

-- PeterThoeny - 05 Mar 2007

You should always provide fallback. For instance by passing a url param and reloading the same page.

I would love to think up an AJAX interface for this, but it would require us to add TWikiAjaxContrib and YahooUserInterfaceContrib to the default contribs.

-- ArthurClemens - 05 Mar 2007

This is a logical move for TWiki, provided performance and system requirements are OK.

-- PeterThoeny - 05 Mar 2007

The default TWiki interface has to work without javascript (or provide a javascript free alternative). As long as we obey this rule I don't see any problems regarding requirements.

System performance does not suffer from adding the contribs.

So let's move on then: AddAjaxContribsToDistribution.

-- ArthurClemens - 05 Mar 2007