What is the intent of view aliases?

[Stanton Sievers <ss...@us.ibm.com>]

Hi everyone,

In the shindig-project/config/container.js there is configuration provided 
for views.  Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
.........
  "views" : {
    "profile" : {
      "isOnlyVisible" : false,
      "urlTemplate" : "http://localhost$
{CONTEXT_ROOT}/gadgets/profile?{var}",
      "aliases": ["DASHBOARD", "default"]
    },
........

I see that aliases are being used in 
org.apache.shindig.gadgets.process.Processor.getView(GadgetContext, 
GadgetSpec) to determine the current view for a gadget.  The use case 
seems to be that if the exact view name from the context isn't found in 
the gadget spec then the aliases for the view name are checked against the 
gadget spec. In the case of the snippet I provided above, for example, if 
"profile" is not found in the gadget spec, then "DASHBOARD" and "default" 
will be checked.

This all makes sense, however, in the common container code (more 
specifically osapi.container.GadgetSite.prototype.render), we don't check 
the view aliases when deciding what view to render.  It only checks the 
exact view name and "default".  Is this by design or is it simply a bug 
that aliases are not being checked as well?

I have a patch that would fix this problem that I can post shortly if this 
is indeed a bug.

Thanks,
-Stanton