Re: Operations used for Testing

2017-03-21 13:53 GMT+01:00 Svante Schubert <svante.schubert@gmail.com>:

Dear SC,

currently we (only) agree that a file format (document) as being specified in the decades before for various formats, is no longer sufficient as smallest unit of interoperability between (editing) applications in the mobile connected world - or even the Internet of Things -, where far more than one entity is working at the same time on a document.

The dispatching of changes oppose of solely exchanging adopted documents between applications for collaboration use is the next evolutionary step. It becomes necessary, as the abiltity to merge changes from various different users, who are working async on document copies (or branches) has become a mandatory requirement of the modern connected world.
Merging something smaller than a document, require the specification of it. XML is specified, but a user change is not necessary disjoint to its mapping to XML and complicates a (merge) scenario that is already complex anyway.

Currently the next step for the ODF standard to adopt the concept of changes is change-tracking, although from an economic stand-point it is quite difficult to explain any office maintainers a concept, which in the first place - if only adopted behind the scenes and therefore invisible to the user - does not improve anything to the user, but costs tremendous development costs, as existing applications where not designed from the beginning to adopt this concept.

Therefore it is important to explain other benefits to current ODF applications.
The biggest opportunity to me is the automated testing of ODF applications via documents and operations (changes) upon them.

Yesterday, I had been creating for the OASIS ODF TC a test scenario and document for page breaks.
The idea came to my mind to add this test document & scenario to the ODF test server, that Jos is currently pushing forward. To be honest, the XPath checks currently being used in the ODF server are to me far too unreadable and require deep XML and ODF knowledge. Therefore, I would love to add a layer of abstraction and use our change operations to relate on user known components, such as table and paragraph.
If this would work, we would instantly have a valuable feature for changes usable for existing ODF applications.

The problem I suddenly faced is that for the previous use cases of interoperable collaboration we only required three types of operations/changes
add,
delete and
modification.
Now for this new testing scenario, I desperately need a new function type that returns a boolean on the existence of a component or its property.
isExistent

It will take some time until I will be able to do some prototyping on the ODF server with operation and tests, as there are already other things on my plate, but I will keep you in the loop. ;)

All the best,
Svante
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