Re: flexfax: Design for a portable Java hylafax clients: i want your opinions, please!

[Dmitry Bely <dbely@mail.ru>]

Joe Phillips <jaiger@net-foundry.com> writes:

> On Fri, May 05, 2000 at 04:36:37PM +0200, Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:
> > Dmitry Bely wrote:
> > 
> > whats about an option for HylaFAX to specify a sort order independend
> > from the JobFmt paramters and Protocol. Something like a SortFmt which 
> > uses nearly the same syntax like JobFmt but specifys the sort order
> > of the queues ?
> > 
> > This should help all clients.
> 
> I vote against this.  I see job sorting as the client's responsibility.  The
> client is a view of the data on the server.  Why complicate the server just
> for sorting?  Adding a SortFmt command to the protocol could also increase
> network overhead (for IMHO useless features.)  Every time the user decides
> they want to sort by some other field, the SortFmt string is sent and then
> the joblist is queried (again) from the server.  The same data could be
> transmitted many times over.  Without a SortFmt, the data is sent once
> and the client can sort and re-sort at will without utilizing the network.

Agree completely (and disagree with Ulrich :-)) Parsing list data is an
easy task --  you can set comma (or tab) separated format via
JOBFMT/RECVFMT commands:

"%-3j,%3i,%1a,%6.6o,%-12.12e,%5P,%5D,%7z,%.25s,%k"

and then split the fields by strtok() or similar function on the client's
side. Once you've parsed the data, sort/display them as user needs --
he/she might want to change sorting interactively just by selecting an
appropriate column. The WHFC's approach, displaying data from the server
without any processing is *wrong* (IMHO).

Hope to hear from you soon,
Dmitry