Document sharing issues

[James Simmons]

Morgan,

I did some work on View Slides over the weekend and I got the document 
sharing code to work OK.  There are still some bugs, but they are not 
related to sharing, at least not directly.  However, in fixing the code 
I discovered the following issues:

1).  Unlike the core Read activity, my activities save shared files as 
Journal entries.  If the child wants to resume reading when the document 
is no longer being shared he can get the document from the Journal with 
no problem.  Unfortunately, if the document *is* still being shared it 
will be downloaded again, whether it needs to be or not.  Ideally, if 
the kid already has the document and it is the same size as the one 
being shared the download would not happen.  How do I accomplish this?

2).  Downloading a document is very slow.  I distribute View Slides 
files on an Apache server, using the Browse activity to copy same to the 
Journal.  This takes under a minute even for a large file (over 15mb).  
Then I share the document with another instance of Sugar on the same 
box.  *That* is agonizingly slow.  I know the two instances are not 
communicating directly, but it still seems like there is a lot of 
overhead going on.  Can I do anything about this?

3). Because downloading documents is so slow,  I have modified my Read 
toolbar to have a running count of bytes downloaded so the user doesn't 
have to stare at an unchanging screen for several minutes wondering if 
anything is going on.  In the core Read code I modified to do this there 
is a comment that it would be good to signal the file size of the file 
being sent, so the user could see a progress bar.  The author never got 
around to doing that, so I don't know how to do that either.  How would 
I go about it?

If you're curious about my code the latest is in the git repository and 
I have a page for View Slides linked from the OLPC Activities page.

Thanks,

James Simmons


Morgan Collett wrote:

>If you get stuck with View Slides, I'll be happy to take a look.
>  
>
>The Read activity is definitely on my list as the sharing was found to
>have reliability issues in recent testing.
>
>Regards
>Morgan
>  
>