Topic on Help talk:Extension:FileImporter

Does FileImporter have API?

5
Edgars2007 (talkcontribs)

hi! so, yeah... what the title says :) I assume the answer is no, then next question is - are there any chance it is in plans? i assume, answer is also no (didn't find anything about this on Phab) :(

some time ago (i think then Fileimporter was in early stages or even before that) i was starting to build a tool for moving images (basically was trying to replicate functionality of FtCG in web). having fileimporter as API would save some time :)

Tacsipacsi (talkcontribs)

If there’s no Phabricator ticket for it, chances are pretty low that it will ever get implemented. If you create one, they’re a bit higher. 😉 (And if you write the API, they’re even higher.)

Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

I wonder what the benefit of such an API would be, in addition to what we currently have? I mean, it's not like one could run a bot that blindly moves an entire File namespace from one wiki to another. FileImporter is not a bot but an interactive tool for a reason. One would need to re-implement pretty much everything FileImporter does, e.g.:

  • Show all possible kinds of error messages.
  • Let the user edit bad or conflicting file names.
  • Ask the user to review the automatic edits made to the file description.
  • Let the user edit and e.g. translate the file description.
  • Direct the user to the target wiki to e.g. categorize the file properly.

We would like to understand the problem you want to solve. What do you try to do with your tool that can't be done with FileImporter?

Edgars2007 (talkcontribs)

"bot that blindly moves an entire File namespace from one wiki to another" - no, that's not on the table or something i'm trying to propose. but i do understand, that this concern would become reality no matter of my or your intentions.

well, why developers provide an API to their services? so that other developers can build some apps on top of that.

about the "what's the problem" part - currently one can mostly do it "randomly" (via articles) or going through some category, where there isn't guarantee, that user won't be presented with files, that somebody has already looked through or otherwise clutter not-yet-looked-through-images. ok, you can so some fancy things (intersections and so on) with Petscan, but I would bet, that many, many users don't know about that. And it happens in "old fashion" way - new filepage is opened in new tab/window etc.

the "proposed solution" (the tool) would contain list of images, that should be good to ex(im)port and presented in SPA-like environment, so that user won't need to go outside tool to make actions. mainly - workflow improvements for power users. something like this.

Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) (talkcontribs)
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