Jump to content
Matt

Evolution of a Feature: The Attachments System

A lot of the time a significant portion of development time is spent working on items that the end user will never get to see. A case in point is the attachments system.

The attachments system was introduced back in the early days of IP.Board. During the development of IP.Board 2.2 the attachment system came under focus for two reasons.

The first reason was that we were already testing the 'new' attachment system in IP.Dynamic (as shown in this movie) and we wanted to introduce that into IP.Board. The original system forced one to wait for an entire page reload before continuing with a post. The new version used a fancy concoction of javascript and iframes to upload data 'inline' - that is, without a page reload. Naturally, AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) would have been an obvious choice but it is impossible to upload data using current XMLHttpRequest methods.

The second reason was that the code was due an overhaul because it was originally developed long before we had our components system in place. This made the original system inflexible and not very extensible. Infact, Remco had to maintain his own attachments system for the IP.Blog component which duplicated PHP code, HTML templates and SQL information.

With this in mind, we abstracted the code into component friendly modules. This allowed one to simply create a new module to manage the component's settings and upload paths. The main attachment class handled the rest. This saved us a lot of code re-use and allowed us to store attachments from several components in one table.

We think the new interface alone is a marked improvement over the old system. It's much quicker and allows one to upload several attachments quickly.

We have plans to further abstract the attachments system in a later version of IP.Board to allow attachments to be saved and retrieved in different formats.

This rather minor feature really highlights how new web technologies and ways of thinking can push even a secondary feature further along and how we're always looking to improve the efficiency of IP.Board and its components.


×
×
  • Create New...