Improving comments support

[Pranav Kant]

Hi all,

I have been looking into improving the comments support in LO, mainly 
bringing the feature of marking comments as resolved[1], other things 
being better root-reply comments relationship, ability to reply to 
comments in spreadsheets and presentations.

I have done some research around comments in OOXML, ODF for text 
documents, spreadsheets and presentations and there were couple of 
changes I have in mind that we would need to make to ODF (introduce LO 
extensions). Please let me know if there are any concerns/thoughts/ideas 
that come to your mind.

Firstly, talking about proper root-reply comment relationship for writer 
(because we support reply comments in writer only), the current 
situation is that if you have a comment thread (one root and several 
reply comments) and you put the visible cursor around the anchor 
position and press enter or any other key, the comment thread breaks 
(c.f [2]). This is because the current code assumes that root-reply 
comments are the ones which have same anchor position. This is wrong in 
my opinion, and doesn't just give rise to [2], but also prevents 
starting another comment thread at same anchor position which maybe be 
required in some situations.

To deal with it, my plan is to use 'office:name' attribute with each and 
every <office:annotation> element corresponding to a comment. ODF spec 
already allows a office:name attribute but currently, this attribute is 
used only when the comment has a text range associated with it. In 
addition to using office:name attribute, we would need to introduce an 
attribute, say loext:parent-annotations-name, which would point to their 
parent comments.

Changing the application logic from interpreting root-reply comment 
relationship from anchor positions to interpreting it from their 
explicit mapping with help of office:name, loext:parent-annotation-name 
attribute should address all existing problems as mentioned above.

We don't have any ability to reply to comments for spreadsheets and 
presentations as of now, but the above approach would also help whenever 
we would introduce reply comments in them.

Now talking about adding the ability to mark comments as resolved, an 
attribute like, office:resolved='true/false' to each <office:annotation> 
element should do.

An office:resolved=false will mean that comment is in opened state and 
an office:resolved=true means that comment has been resolved. Whenever a 
comment thread is marked as resolved, we would add a new annotation with 
text '<comment resolution remarks>' with its office:resolved='true'. 
Applications can find out if a comment thread is resolved or not by just 
checking the office:resolved state of the last comment in the thread. 
Reopening a comment would be possible by just adding another annotation 
with office:resolved=false to our annotation chain.

Summarizing, these are the LO extensions that we would end up with -
a) loext:annotation-parent-name attribute in <office:annotation> element
b) loext:resolved=true/false attribute in <office:annotation> element

Let me know what you think.

[1] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106126
[2] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106227

-- 
Regards,
Pranav