[Product-Developers] "Special" Articles and their presentation in lists

[Michael Hierweck]

Hi,

assume there is a website using several kinds of article, e.g.
NewsItems, Events and several more. The articles use different sets of
fields, e.g. NewsItem provides an image, Event provides location, start
and end time...

The default folder listings do not care about special fields even though
from the users point of view it would be nice to see this additional
information in folder listings.

A generic folder cannot know about additional fields to show. (The
default folder listing make some assumptions and tests for some fields
related to the default content types. This way the folder "knows" that
there a types that provide an image.)

A better solution might be to enable the article itself to provide its
list representation. The folder listing would query this representation
for all list items to be shown.

There could be adaptors (implementing a simple interface
ListRepresentationProvider) for special kinds of articles and a generic
one for all content objects using only title, description and a link.

What do you think? Great, overkill, useless?
What about performance? The folder listing what have to call getObject
on each item to show, plus adaptor lookup on these objects.


Michael