functional-fundations.adoc

Functional fundations

Reactivity is built on top of a set functional fundations described here. They define the fundamental business objects manipulated by the users and their dependencies.

User

Obviously Reactivity manages the user who needs to create an account in order to use it. There is no particular disposition in the definition of a user that differs from the common considerations encountered in softwares.

Organization

The organization is a working space created by a user where the activity is managed. The creator of an organization is free to invite other users to join it and interract with them inside that space.

Artifact

Artifacts are objects created by the users to represent their activity. A fundamental property of the artifact is the date, whose meaning is up to the user.

The rest of their structure is composed by a set of fields. Some of the fields are immutable, can be mandatory and pre-defined by Reactivity. Those particular fields will be mentionned inside the Category section. This section will also explain how additional fields can be defined at organization level by the users to track additional activity information in the artifacts.

Category

Categories are activity qualifiers. They can be defined as a catalog of free values at organization level. A category can be used to tag an activity and is identified as a field of the artifact, marked as optional or not by the user. This offers filtering and grouping capabilities. Reactivity defines built in categories with a data source based on the organization’s state:

• User: the user category is an artifact’s field optionally filled that is composed of the users associated to the current selected organization.

• Status: a status category is an artifact’s field optionnally filled with TODO, WIP or DONE value.

• Interval: an interval allows to group the activity by day, week, month, hour or minute. This category can’t be associated to an artifact but allows a table view to compute its date, as described in the Table section.

Following rules are defined for the categories:

• User and Status categories can be customized at organization level. Additional items can be added with free labels and pre-defined items can be renamed or removed.

• If the day interval category is used, the date of the artifact is automatically computed according to the associated day.

View

A view is a representation of the activity produced over a period of time by the users inside an organization.

This fundamental object defines from when the activity of the organization will be viewed:

• A start date can be explictely defined. In that case, a end date can be optionally specified. If no end date is defined, the period covers all the activity newer than the start date.

• If no start date is defined, the n last artifacts are displayed.

Optionally the view can be also associated to a category that will be used to filter more the activity to display. Artifact created in that view will be automatically associated to that category.

Many views can be defined inside an organization. A view is also typed with the structure of data that is ready to consume. Those structures have a immutable definition and are enumerated by Reactivity for all organizations.

A view can be marked as private by the user who creates it in order to not make it visible by the others.

List

A list is a basic data structure that types the view that displays the artifacts on several lines. A line can be configured to display some categories and hide some other information.

Table

A table is a data structure that can type a view. A table displays the artifacts in a matrix with one dimension (column) or optionally with two dimensions (columns + rows). Columns and rows are defined with the available categories (user, status, interval and additional catalogs defined in the organization). When the categories are used to list the columns or the rows, their values are automatically associated to the artifact regarding its position inside the table.

When the artifact 's fields values corresponding to the category used in the columns and the rows are not defined, artifacts are displayed outside the table. A zone dedicated to that purpose is visible and is part of the table type.

When an interval category is used to define the columns or the rows, the artifact date is automatically computed with the associated value that has been obtained relatively to the starting date of the view.

Time series

Time series is a data structure that type a view. The values correspond to the result of an operation that has counted the number of artifacts by grouping them with a particular category value. The result of that transformation allows the view to let the user chose between different kind of chart (line, pie, bar, gauge, etc).

Summary

Following fundamental objects have been defined:

• User: people who interract with Reactivity to manage their activity

• Organization: the space where users manage their activity

• Artifact: the object that reflects the user activity

• View: the way activity is viewed by users and which activity of the organization

• Table or Time series: a data structure selected by the view according to its needs to display the data

A set of basic mockups illustrates how the different objects can be managed through the UI.