Why bother with relative position in URL?

[pnear]

I've always found it annoying that coppermine uses a relative position in the URL when navigating from album to intermediate image.  Clearly there is a permanent URL for the intermediate page, as it is referenced in the picture details.

There may be a reason for using relative positions that I'm unaware of, but here's my argument as to why we should ditch it in favour of a permanent id.

1. When a user copies a URL for passing along to a friend (where user=me) it is easiest and most intuitive to copy the URL in the address bar.
2. When a user is browsing during an upload or change to the album, they will not arrive at the image they expect since the pointer is now leading them to a different image than the thumbnail they clicked on.

Curious to know if there's a good reason for the relative position (I assume there is) and wonder what it would take to make the URLs more of a permanent link.

Pete

[donnoman]

Using the pid instead of relative position would also fix the meta_albums that spontaneously change like when viewing the "last viewed" meta album.

when a user is viewing that meta album, clicks on a thumb, then hits back, clicks on a different thumb, the intermediate image now links to  a different picture, because of the fact that they viewed a picture and changed the underlying order without respect to the cached thumbnails page.

If the page had been generated with pids, it would have been avoided, and the page wont reflect new activity until it's refreshed. I think that just makes more sense.

But I don't know the underlying reasons for the relative positioning either.

[Tarique Sani]

Relative positions are currently saving running some extra queries on displayimage.php, and supports the twisted idea that the meta-albums position should always be correct.

BUT pid is infact being used to show the picture when the user goes from thumbnails.php to displayimage.php

The permanent link is the URL which is shown in the picture info - that has just the pid

[omniscientdeveloper]

I think the point they're trying to say is that the pictures can be ordered by the relative id, while the url shows the permanent id.


On a side note, I think there are already a few threads on this topic floating around. Maybe this one is redundant.

[Tarique Sani]

I think the point they're trying to say is that the pictures can be ordered by the relative id, while the url shows the permanent id.

I understood - what I am trying to say is if you do not pass the relative position to displayimage.php then the code will have to jump through some more hoops to get the next and previous links specially in cases of metalbums.

[Joachim Müller]

this is not exactly a bug, but a matter of taste or a feature request, so I'm marking this thread as invalid.

Joachim