Closed
Bug 291255
Opened 19 years ago
Closed 15 years ago
calICalendar getItems progress
Categories
(Calendar :: Internal Components, enhancement)
Calendar
Internal Components
Tracking
(Not tracked)
RESOLVED
DUPLICATE
of bug 472483
People
(Reporter: gekacheka, Unassigned)
References
()
Details
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3 Build Identifier: trunk Currently the only progress information available while loading a calendar, say with calICalendar getItems, is that getItems calls are being made. http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/calendar/base/public/calICalendar.idl#208 In a future version it would be nice to to be able to show some sort of progress bar. * ICS calendar providers might be able to provide size of the file loaded so far and the full file size, if the remote server provides a file size (or estimated from previous file size). * Database providers might be able to provide the number of items returned so far and the number of items in the table or query result. * Composite providers might show some composite progress, such as the average of the percentages of each of its component calendars. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: (One possible approach might be to add this information to the aDetail parameter of the onGetResult method of calIOperationListener.) http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/calendar/base/public/calICalendar.idl#364 (An alterative interface change might be to add version of getItems which passes something like nsIProgressEventSink. But it's not clear what to pass as the aRequest and aContext parameters to the nsiProgressEventSink.onProgress method.) http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/netwerk/base/public/nsIProgressEventSink.idl#43
I'm not sure we have any providers that can tell how many items there are in a set until they've processed them, or have effectively retrieved them from the data store. In the mozStorage case, we could select the count(*) as well, but we'd get that when the first row came in, and would basically be pumping back calls immediately after that; all the waiting is over by then. Similarly with CalDAV, which won't get a result from the server until the op is completed, and ICS, which only knows how many items are in a VCALENDAR when it hits the END: block, by which point it's done. If there are more expensive operations than retrieval being performed, the operating code should know how many are being operated on, and could perform the book-keeping itself. Because asynchronous notifications could in theory be re-ordered, putting some ordinal in the calls might also be misleading, and I don't think providers should be responsible for tracking that for the sake of a possible future caller. I might be missing a use case, though: can you described what sort of operation would want these progress notifications, and is such that the provider can inform the caller usefully?
USE CASE: A progress bar is needed particularly when the data is on a remote server. In that case, the bottleneck is the network rather than the disk. Someone who opens a large event calendar on a slow link (say, dialup or slow wireless) is going to want to see how fast it is making progress. (People will open large calendars. Some Sunbird users have tried opening or importing calendars with a thousand or more of events in them and complained Sunbird was unusable. A calendar may be large because - the calendar covers a long period (such as an active calendar in daily use for years), or - the calendar covers parallel tracks (such as schedules for large conferences or an olympiad), or - the calendar contains detailed descriptions (such as talk abstracts or meeting agendas).) EVENT COUNT NOT NECESSARY FOR PROGRESS FRACTION: For a progress bar, just need a fraction (a number so far)/(total expected number). The numbers need not count events provided: if it is easier or more informative to provide a different number, such as the byte count, or rows scanned, or something else, it may. As mentioned, a remote ICS file provider might use the http content-size and bytes so far rather than the event count. Maybe aDetail could provide one or two numbers which are encouraged but not required for providers: - progressFraction: float fraction provided so far if known (else -1) [- expectTotal: a total number of events if known (else -1).] Only the progressFraction is needed for a progress bar. [ExpectTotal might be useful to some callers for preallocating an array to store the events, but it is not as important as progressFraction. ExpectTotal may be dropped if it is not useful enough.] (An alternative would be to providing a number so far and a total number, which are not necessarily event counts. But because some providers provide event counts, someone might erroneously come to expect that they are always event counts. By using progressFraction and expectTotal, it is clear when eventTotal is -1 the progressFraction was computed on a different basis than the event count.) ORDER: Currently the getItems interface says (1) the events are returned in occurrence order, and (2) it may be replaced by something more SQL-like (which I take to mean it might include sorting). The order matters already, so it does not appear to be an additional burden. (For the first case, the composite calendar could do a date-ordered merge on the ordered component result streams and still provide results somewhat incrementally.) http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/calendar/base/public/calICalendar.idl#208
Comment 3•19 years ago
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(In reply to comment #2) > As mentioned, a remote ICS > file provider might use the http content-size and bytes so far rather > than the event count. Just using the download progress isn't enough. After downloading, the file needs to be parsed. This might take some time as well. So it isn't that simple.
Tracking the download progress should be possible already, since that's a network function and not a calendar processing one (and we don't do ICS-fetching from getItems in the general case). We don't know how far libical is into processing the string buffer we provide it until it's done. The storage provider doesn't know how many rows have been scanned until the query returns its first row, and since we return in order, that means that all rows have of necessity been scanned. I guess what I meant to ask was: if you were to write a patch that added some progressFraction to the callback, can you point out to me where our providers would calculate that fraction meaningfully? I can't think of any where we know a fraction that's interesting before we've got most of the hard work done, and it's up to the callback to determine what expensive operation it's going to perform on the results. I think that in pretty much every case there's going to be a "still doing something" indeterminate-progress for most of the operation, then a very fast counting up from 0% to 100%. We talked about progress notification when we were first designing these interfaces, and didn't come up with anything workable, which is why I'm interested in hearing concrete data-flow examples here. I think the reason that people thought Sunbird was broken before, on large calendars, was that it just hung the UI while processing data. Eliminating that is in large part why we have the async-callback model of the post-0.2 trunk.
Comment 5•19 years ago
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It's possible that we should kill the "return in order" piece of the getItems contract. That was put there just to make initial porting of the old UI code easy, because the old UI code depended on it. I think the one case where this could be useful is for WebDAV ICS calendars, since the percentage could meaningfully be calculated from bytes received/total bytes. Note that the up-and-coming calICachingCalendar is likely to make this functionality even less used.
Unfortunately, I do not have cycles to work on Calendar stuff these days (just as it's getting to the good part!), so I am a bad owner for these bugs. To delete the tragically-large chunk of bugspam, search for gregorianabdication.
Assignee: shaver → nobody
Comment 7•15 years ago
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This should be part of the following bug:
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 15 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
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Description
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