Shamed by kris’ post about the state of Project Ridley stuff, I resumed the recent-files hacking after the gnome-utils/gnome-dictionary crazy run that occupied my nights in the last three months or so.
RecentManager and RecentChooser
I already did a review of the documentation and the code last month, but I stopped before committing because I wanted to make a major overhauling of the sorting and filtering stuff – namely, the removal of the sorting and filtering functions from the RecentManager class and the implementation of custom sorting inside the RecentChooser class.
At first, I designed the RecentManager object as the only proxy for every operation on the list of recently used resources; then I designed the RecentChooser interface, in order to create a uniform API to display and access the data provided by the RecentManager. It all worked without much pain: you would instantiate a RecentChooser implementation and it would create its own manager. This, though, led to an unclean separation between model and viewer in an otherwise MVC approach. I went back to the design table, and severed each direct usage of the RecentManager API that would affect the list displayed by the RecentChooser from within the various implementations. This approach allowed the usage of the same RecentManager instance inside N RecentChooser implementations – allowing, also, to have a single, session-based, RecentManager instance shared between various processes (not coded, until we can integrate all the stuff inside GTK). The only downside in this operation was due to code replication between the RecentChooser and the RecentManager; thus, like I already did move the filtering stuff out inside the RecentFilter object, I moved the sorting stuff inside the RecentChooser API (and its implementations) and out of the RecentManager – which now just manages the list, and it’s used just to add, look up and remove resources from the list it holds.
More informations on the wiki: here and here.
LinkButton
I also did some work on the LinkButton, the widget that should supercede GnomeHref from libgnomeui. Attached to bug #314808 there’s the current implementation.
More informations on the wiki: here.