Proposal: behavior aliases

[vangheem]

Instead of needing to reference complete behavior interfaces names, be able to register a behavior with an alias.

For example, a PATCH like this:

"guillotina.behaviors.dublincore.IDublinCore": {
                    "title": "foo",
                    "description": "bar",
                    "tags": ["one", "two"]
                }

Could be changed to:

"dublincore": {
                    "title": "foo",
                    "description": "bar",
                    "tags": ["one", "two"]
                }

Registering behavior would change to add "alias" option for the configurator.

[bloodbare]

What aproach would be then for the serialization ? The goal is to reduce the payload ?

[ebrehault]

It would make the object nicer on the frontend (always painful to write res['guillotina.behaviors.dublincore.IDublinCore'])

[bloodbare]

Agree that is painful to write the interfaces to access the subschemas, the question is how we normalize on serialization the different interfaces, I mean, if we define guillotina.behaviors.dublincore.IDublinCore to dublincore and there is a field on top called dublincore, how we will be deterministic about where the content belongs.

What about a definition of how a field that is a subschema is serialized and deserialized. Something like no option to have fields with 'b.' at the begining so we can use: b.dublincore ?

[vangheem]

@bloodbare conflicts would be rare I think but yes, produce a situation with unclear behavior.

I'm not sure about "b.dublincore" though.. hmmm. Also could do @behavior.dublincore...

I'd prefer just simple alias though.

[vangheem]

Another question: do we serialize with alias or with full dotted name?

[vangheem]

and is "alias" the right term. Should it just be "name"?

[vangheem]

I think I still want to do this. Any more thoughts on this? What about configuration validation so you can't have an alias that is a field or something like that?

[iham]

doesn't plone have something thats called a "named behavior" to make life easier with theses dotted names?

maybe i am missing the point, but a "guillotina.dublincore" or "g.dublincore" similar would be nice. way nicer then the whole dotted name.

[vangheem]

@iham I'm not aware of anything like this in plone. I'd prefer an alias over some sort of g.dublincore shortened version though.

[jensens]

For Plone we introduced behavior shortnames a while ago and use them. plone.dublincore is a bad example (because composite behaviors are a bad idea, but thats different topic).

Look at https://docs.plone.org/external/plone.app.dexterity/docs/reference/standard-behaviours.html for a list of the names.

Using a namespace prefix like plone. is a good idea, but using the dotted name not. Refactoring, moving interfaces around and so on becomes painful then. Also its very difficult to remember those long names.

[vangheem]

awesome! thanks @jensens !

[vangheem]

closing, not doing for now.