Collaboration Store, Part XXXIV

“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”
— Stephen Covey

So far, we have completed the first two of the three primary components of the project, the initial set-up process and the application publication process. The last of the three major pieces will be the process that will allow you to install an application obtained from the store. Before we dive straight into that, though, we should pause to take a quick look at what we have, and what still needs to be done in order to make this a viable product. At this point, you can install all of the prerequisites and then grab the latest Update Set, install it, and go through the set-up process to create either a Host or Client instance. Once you get through all of that, you are ready to publish any local Scoped Application to the store, which will then be shared with all other instances in your Collaboration Store community.

What you cannot do, just yet, is to find an application published to the store by some other instance and install it on your own instance. That’s the missing third leg of the stool that we will need to take on next. But that is not all that is left to be done. Once we get the basics to work, there are quite a number of other things to address before one could consider this to be truly usable. Some things are just annoyances, but others are definite features that you would have to consider essential for a complete product.

Speaking of annoyances, one of the things that I really don’t like is that when you publish an app to XML for distribution, the resulting Update Set XML does not include the app’s logo image. Clearly it is a part of the app, and if you push an app to an internal store and pull it down into another instance, it comes complete with the logo, so why they left that out of the XML is a mystery to me. I don’t like that for a couple of reasons: 1) when you pull down the XML for this app, you do not get the logo, and 2) when we use the XML to publish an app to the store, the logo is missing there as well. I have seen people complain about this, but I have not, as yet, seen a solution. I would really like to address that, both for my own apps as well as for the process that we are using in this one.

Speaking of logos, another feature that I would like to have is to provide the ability for each instance to have its own distinctive logo image, so that everything from that particular instance could be tagged with that image as a way to visually identify where the app originated. That’s not a critical feature, which is why I did not include it initially, but it has always been something that I felt should be a part of the process, particularly when you start thinking about ways to browse the store and find what you are looking for. That’s definitely on the We-will-get-around-to-it-one-day list.

Browsing the store is another thing that will need some attention at some point. Right now, we just want to prove that we can set-up the app, publish an application, and install an application published by someone else. Those are the fundamental elements of the app. But once we get all of that worked out, being able to hunt through the store to find what you want will be another important capability to build out. We’re not done with the fundamentals just yet, so we don’t want to put too much energy into that issue right at the moment, but at some point, we will need to create a user-friendly way to easily find what you need.

That, of course, leads into things like searchable keywords, tags, user ratings, reviews, and the like, but now is not the time to head down that rabbit hole. Still, there are a lot of possibilities here, and this could turn into a life-long project in and of itself. That’s probably not a good thing, though!

Anyway, we won’t get anything done if we don’t focus, so we need to stay on task and figure out the application installation process. Once again, there are several options available, but the nicest one seems to be the process that you go through to install an app from an internal store. That’s basically a one-click operation and then the app is installed. Unfortunately, that particular page is neither Jelly nor AngularJS, so you can’t just peek under the hood and see the magic like you can with so many other things on the Now Platform. Another option would be to hack up a copy of the Import XML Action on the Update Set list page to push in the attached XML from a published app version, but that only takes things so far; you still have to Preview the Update Set, resolve any issues, and then manually issue the Commit. It would be much nicer if we could just push a button and have the app installation process run in the background and notify you when it was completed. Obviously, we have some work to do here to come up with the best way to go about this, and we had better figure that out relatively soon. Next time, if we are not dealing with test results from the last release, we will need to start building this out.