Our shift toward more synchronous components (specifically text components, which tend to serve as "glue" for other kinds of data) makes version creation a little more problematic.
For objects that have transactions (e.g., pages in CoWeb), versions can be automatically created whenever a transaction is performed. This is conceptually simple, but presents a different set of problems:
- Limited meta-data (at least in CoWeb's implementation -- this could certainly be overcome in BRIDGE)
- For some applications, users are likely to use transactions to save intermediate forms. This will result in a large number of versions.
A solution to the problem for synchronous components could consist of three parts:
- Menu item in the interactive client (available on all writable components) which would allow the user to save a version, optionally providing a comment describing the version
- Automatic version creation on submission of (inherently transcactional) web form. This would provide some means of recovery for cases where a web submission wipes out concurrent synchronous work.
- Automatic version creation based on idle time. This could be done (e.g.) at a particular time each day, versioning all changed objects. Possible solutions to this are described in "Automatic versioning".
Additional thought needs to be put into the version browsing interface(s). The initial implementation (for the June 2002 workshop) will likely just include browsing of versions from the web.
Details of bridge-level support for versioning is described here: BRIDGE object versioning and tracking
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