GitLab Incubation Engineering, 9 Jun 2022

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From YouTube: Incubation Engineering Real-time updates of issue descriptions – Update 09-06-2022

Description

Checkout this GitLab handbook page for more details: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/real-time-collaboration/

The tech design doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VI5rjUTYt-qdVLrVStpOygeio5iy2el9y7UTwfuO-aU/edit

A

Hey folks and welcome to the second update uh of the single-engine group, colorado collaborative real-time editing of visual descriptions this week is a bit different. It's not just an update, it's also talking a fair bit about what's coming next and what the challenges are and also settling a bit on terminology for uh collaborative editing in order to get alignment between all the affected groups within gitlab. I've created a tech design and this tech design is accessible by everyone within the gitlab organization today and eventually will be transformed into epics and issues.

A

So it's going to be accessible by everyone. This document is going to be pretty comprehensive. It's a detailed um outline on what we need to build and how we can build it and what the limitations are of the current platform and what we need to change in order to get there. It also has a few ideas on working around the limitations that we're most likely going to see so expect a large document.

A

um I do not expect everyone to read it, but it might be interesting if you're, you know curious about the details of how the implementation is going to happen. Let's talk a bit about terminology: what is a collaborative editing session? The common understanding is that many people work collaboratively on a single document. Together, a document is just a container or an umbrella term, where we group, together all the properties that are changed collaboratively. So the way I'd like to describe this is one document has many fields that can be edited.

A

So in this case, for example, field 1 could be a text field field, 2 could be a multi-select and field. 3 could be another input form at the end of the day.

A

Every user that participates in that collaborative editing session can change all the fields at any time and that will not cause any conflicts whatsoever with the edits of the other clients. Let's see how we can implement this at gitlab. First of all, we need to identify what a document is, and what I'd like to propose here is that our pages are just documents.

A

The advantages are pretty clear. First of all, every page has a unique url every issue.

A

Every merch request is identifiable by the gitlab organization, the project or subproject, and the issue id the second advantage that we have by reusing the existing page as a document is that we already have a permission, an established permission model, so we know exactly who is allowed to edit an issue who's allowed to comment on an issue and um yeah who can delete an issue as well, and the one missing piece that we have is awareness we need to know which users are currently participating in the editing session.

A

Let's look at an example here you can see a collaborative editing session between four users. Hannah sid, bartek and eric are working on an issue description together and because there are the four there are the four profile images rendered at the top. Every participant knows who they are working with.

A

Also, we can identify the other important pieces of a collaborative editing session. We have a unique document id the url of the issue. We have a single text field that we are concurrently editing on and we have. The two awareness features the user profiles, but also the label. That tells me who is currently editing which part of the text this gives me additional information and helps me in interacting with others in a collaborative editing session.

A

Let's take a look how this could be added to gitlab's ui, as you can see in the at the top in the toolbar there's now a collaborative editing session menu you can use it in order to manage the session, send invite links search for users that you would like to collaborate on, etc, and here's how it looks like when users are actually collaborating the user to the left type. Some text and the user to the right will immediately see what the left user has done. That's it for the week, thanks for watching.