- Just a single huge commit. This has been developed over too long a
time, required many tiny changes across too many files and has seen too
many iterations to be separated into separate commits.
The original branch with all the messy commits will be kept around for
posterity
bb220ad0f2...adomasven:feature/react-item-tree
- Replaces XUL <tree> element across the whole zotero client codebase
with a custom supermegafast virtualized-table inspired by
react-virtualized yet mimicking old XUL treeview API. The
virtualized-table sits on top on a raw-to-the-metal,
interpreted-at-runtime JS based windowing solution inspired by
react-window. React-based solutions could not be used because they were
slow and Zotero UI needs to be responsive and be able to
display thousands of rows in a treeview without any slowdowns.
- Attempts were made at making this screen-reader friendly, but yet to
be tested with something like JAWS
- RTL-friendly
- Styling and behaviour across all platforms was copied as closely as
possible to the original XUL tree
- Instead of row-based scroll snapping this has smooth-scrolling. If
you're using arrow keys to browse through the tree then it effectively
snap-scrolls. Current CSS snap scroll attributes do not seem to work in
the way we would require even on up-to-date browsers, yet alone the ESR
version of FX that Zotero is on. JS solutions are either terrible for
performance or produce inexcusable jitter.
- When dragging-and-dropping items the initial drag freezes the UI for
a fairly jarring amount of time. Does not seem to be fixable due to
the synchronous code that needs to be run in the dragstart handler.
Used to be possible to run that code async with the XUL tree.
- Item tree column picker no longer has a dedicated button. Just
right-click the columns. The column preferences (width, order, etc) are
no longer handled by XUL, which required a custom serialization and
storage solution that throws warnings in the developer console due to
the amount of data being stored. Might cause temporary freezing on HDDs
upon column resize/reorder/visibility toggling.
- Context menu handling code basically unchanged, but any UI changes
that plugins may have wanted to do (including adding new columns) will
have to be redone by them. No serious thought has gone into how plugin
developers would achieve that yet.
- Opens up the possibility for awesome alternative ways to render the
tree items, including things like multiple-row view for the item tree,
which has been requested for a long while especially by users switching
from other referencing software
While trying to get translation and citing working with asynchronously
generated data, we realized that drag-and-drop support was going to
be...problematic. Firefox only supports synchronous methods for
providing drag data (unlike, it seems, the DataTransferItem interface
supported by Chrome), which means that we'd need to preload all relevant
data on item selection (bounded by export.quickCopy.dragLimit) and keep
the translate/cite methods synchronous (or maintain two separate
versions).
What we're trying instead is doing what I said in #518 we weren't going
to do: loading most object data on startup and leaving many more
functions synchronous. Essentially, this takes the various load*()
methods described in #518, moves them to startup, and makes them operate
on entire libraries rather than individual objects.
The obvious downside here (other than undoing much of the work of the
last many months) is that it increases startup time, potentially quite a
lot for larger libraries. On my laptop, with a 3,000-item library, this
adds about 3 seconds to startup time. I haven't yet tested with larger
libraries. But I'm hoping that we can optimize this further to reduce
that delay. Among other things, this is loading data for all libraries,
when it should be able to load data only for the library being viewed.
But this is also fundamentally just doing some SELECT queries and
storing the results, so it really shouldn't need to be that slow (though
performance may be bounded a bit here by XPCOM overhead).
If we can make this fast enough, it means that third-party plugins
should be able to remain much closer to their current designs. (Some
things, including saving, will still need to be made asynchronous.)
There are hundreds more, but these are all the ones that generate warnings in
the console at startup. XPCOM/XBL ones don't seem to do so, so we can ignore
those for now (and hopefully not bother with them on 4.0). Instances in
translators do generate warnings.
Addresses #656
Our modifications no longer include a custom yield handler to
automatically call all() on yielded arrays (which maintained Bluebird
1.x behavior). It's now necessary to call all() or similar explicitly.
Also fixed a few incorrect yields hidden by that behavior.
- Zotero.Item.prototype.getFilePath() is now synchronous, with a separate async getFilePathAsync()
- getFile() no longer takes a skipExistsCheck parameter, since that shouldn't happen synchronously
- Zotero.Items.getByLibraryAndKey() is now synchronous again, with a
separate Zotero.Items.getByLibraryAndKeyAsync() - I haven't fully
tested this, so I'm not sure if there will need to be any async
calls.
- Some of the full-text indexing functions now take file paths instead of nsIFile objects
- Zotero.File.getContentsAsync() can now take a string path as well
Promise-based rewrite of most of the codebase, with asynchronous database and file access -- see https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/518 for details.
WARNING: This includes backwards-incompatible schema changes.
An incomplete list of other changes:
- Schema overhaul
- Replace main tables with new versions with updated schema
- Enable real foreign key support and remove previous triggers
- Don't use NULLs for local libraryID, which broke the UNIQUE index
preventing object key duplication. All code (Zotero and third-party)
using NULL for the local library will need to be updated to use 0
instead (already done for Zotero code)
- Add 'compatibility' DB version that can be incremented manually to break DB
compatibility with previous versions. 'userdata' upgrades will no longer
automatically break compatibility.
- Demote creators and tags from first-class objects to item properties
- New API syncing properties
- 'synced'/'version' properties to data objects
- 'etag' to groups
- 'version' to libraries
- Create Zotero.DataObject that other objects inherit from
- Consolidate data object loading into Zotero.DataObjects
- Change object reloading so that only the loaded and changed parts of objects are reloaded, instead of reloading all data from the database (with some exceptions, including item primary data)
- Items and collections now have .parentItem and .parentKey properties, replacing item.getSource() and item.getSourceKey()
- New function Zotero.serial(fn), to wrap an async function such that all calls are run serially
- New function Zotero.Utilities.Internal.forEachChunkAsync(arr, chunkSize, func)
- Add tag selector loading message
- Various API and name changes, since everything was breaking anyway
Known broken things:
- Syncing (will be completely rewritten for API syncing)
- Translation architecture (needs promise-based rewrite)
- Duplicates view
- DB integrity check (from schema changes)
- Dragging (may be difficult to fix)
Lots of other big and little things are certainly broken, particularly with the UI, which can be affected by async code in all sorts of subtle ways.
