“Ideas don’t happen in isolation. You must embrace opportunities to broadcast and then refine your ideas through the energy of those around you.”
— Scott Belsky
Now that we have released the latest version of the Collaboration Store Update Sets for testing purposes, we should take a quick look ahead to see where things might go from here. Obviously, the first order of business is to validate the existing build and work to put out that 1.0 version with the current feature set. However, it won’t hurt to take a moment and look a little bit beyond that to see what may lie ahead for this app. This first version accomplishes the three main goals of providing the ability to set-up an instance, publish an app, and install an app, but there are a lot things missing that would be helpful and/or really nice to have. So let’s take a look at that list.
Images
One of the things that has disturbed me for quite some time is the fact that the logo image for an app is not included in the Update Set when you select the Publish to Update Set… option on the Custom Application form. We use that very same function to move an app into the Store, so our process suffers from the same shortcoming. We should be able to add some extra processing to our workflow, however, that could work around this issue. One of the things that I thought might provide a solution would be to copy the image file attached to the app and attach the copy to the Collaboration Store application record. Then during the installation process, we could copy the image from the application record over to the installed app once the application installation process was completed. That would also provide the opportunity to display the application logo on the application form, which could be done in much the same way as the user photo is displayed on the User Profile form.
Speaking of images, I have also thought from the beginning that each instance in the community should have its own image as well, and that all of the applications shared by that instance should include the providing instance’s image as well as the specific image of the application. This would provide additional visual clues when searching through the apps in the store.
Conditionals and UI Policies
What you can and cannot do with certain records and fields needs to be tied to the original owner of the artifact. For example, the Install button should not appear on version records for your own applications. Conversely, the Publish to Collaboration Store link should not appear on applications that are not your own. And all of the form fields on records that did not originate in your instance should be protected, as you should not be allowed to make changes to records that are not your own. Also, there are certain fields that should never be updated under any circumstances (such as the version number), as these are determined by background processes and should never be editable. There is a lot of work that needs to be done in this area, and it probably should be done before the initial 1.0 version is released to the general public.
Shopping
Version 1.0 was all about getting the mechanics to work, making sure that a scoped app on one instance could be shared, stored, distributed, and installed on some other instance. Once testing establishes that all of those things work as they should, though, it will be time to start looking into setting up a much better experience for locating an app that looks interesting or meets a specific purpose. Images will help create a more visual, catalog shopping type of searching, but so will key words and categories and even marketing tools and programmatic hints such as “People who installed this app also installed these apps:”. User ratings, comments, error reports, and other feedback would also help improve the shopping experience. Also, statistics on how many instances have installed the app and which versions were in use would be useful information when looking at available options. So many possibilities; so little time.
Activity Tracking
From the onset of this project I have always thought that there should be some kind of running log of the activities within each instance, particularly the Host. I set up a table for this early on when I was first setting up the tables for the app, but there is no code in this version to write to this table for any reason. The next major release, if there is such a thing, should really complete this functionality and log every movement of data between the Host and the Clients. Maybe a simple logActivity function could be crafted to accept certain arguments and then all you would have to do to add logging would be to add a single line of code to call that shared function. That sounds like a project, though, but it needs to be done at some point.
Code Consolidation
A while back I created a series of shared function to replace a collection of cloned functions so that I would not clone them all for yet a third time. In my new use case, I utilized the shared functions that were designed to work in all three places, but I was too lazy to go back and refactor the original two sections of code where I had done the initial cloning. I really need to take the time to go back and rework the original and that first copy to have both of them use the redesigned functions that were designed to work for all of the places where I needed to ship instance data, application data, version data, and XML Update Set attachments from one instance to another. It works the way that it is right now, but for future maintenance (and just decent coding standards), that all needs to be addressed.
Additional Artifacts
This initial version allows you to share Scoped Applications between unrelated instances in the same community (Clients of the same Host). That is a good start, but it would also be nice to be able to share single artifacts or global Update Sets or any other component or collection developed on the Now Platform. That was a little more than I was willing to take on at the onset of this project, but now that the sharing of apps between instances seems to be a reality, it would be nice to branch out a little and start adding more stuff that could be shared. Once again, I seem to have more ideas than I do free time. Still, it would be nice to do more than just whole apps.
First Things First
Still, the original goal was to see if we could just make this work, and although it seems like everything is functioning as it should, every little thing needs to be tested out. Hopefully, a few brave souls are actually busy doing that very thing while I type this out, so maybe we will get some much needed feedback relatively soon and see if this thing actually works for anyone other than myself! As always, any feedback of any kind is always appreciated. Thanks in advance to those of you who have actually pulled this down and given things a go.
