More progress

At last week's meeting, we decided on a solution to MB's templating issues, but the design is yet to be finalized or implemented. At the moment my code still uses jQuery to clone hidden HTML fragments on the page, which is ugly and tedious.

My current challenge in implementing the relationship editor is the amount of information it needs access to on the page. To function properly, the JavaScript needs to know:

• What relationships the server has
• What relationships are pending (i.e. entered by the user), even if there's an error and the page refreshes
• A structure of link type data (including ids, allowed attributes, descriptions, link phrases, etc.).

These are partially solved by requesting this info from the database and embedding it into the template's JavaScript as JSON. If the new templating system were in place, it would be much nicer to be able request this data as it's needed (e.g. link type descriptions, attributes).

Some data we have to request as it's needed: for example, when a user searches for an entity, the rel editor needs to know all of its relationships. The XML web service is not sufficient for this, because it doesn't include database ids and other essential information. For this, last week I added an ?inc=rels argument to the /ws/js/entity web service: http://bitmap.mbsandbox.org/ws/js/entity/93889748-1092-3241-8b31-c648203415f3?inc=rels

With more of the backend in place, I've made a ton of progress. Although I missed the deadline for my first task ("Relate multiple recordings on a release to works"), I still feel that I'm ahead of schedule, because much of my code is portable to the other tasks, making them much easier to implement.