Enhancement: Optimizing events

[stpronk]

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Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I am making a app based on the deck app, and I trying to use the events as they are available within the code. The issue is that they all use the same event which isn't a problem by itself, but they don't give through all the required data. As an example, the biggest that I want to use are the CardUpdatedEvents but when I reorder a card, only one card is passed through to the event which is not even the updated card in the first place.

Describe the solution you'd like
The events should be altered to represented the correct actions by using an action parameter and/or giving every action it's own event class. Besides that, the full and correct data should be passed through to the event.

Describe alternatives you've considered
I tried building on top of the events with if statements, but the before data is missing by a lot of events or pass through incorrect data which halted every solution.

[stpronk]

@grnd-alt As mentioned in #7124 (review) , you would like some more context about the app i'm speaking of.

The app is still private as we just started working on it, but I could describe the the functionality of the app. We want to hook into the events to setup more email notifications with a specific format. The infrastructure where we are running NextCloud is completely closed from the internet and the only way out is through email at this moment in time (might be an secure api in the future). When a card changes stack we want need to inform our client that something has happened with their card which leaves us no choice then to created an email while copy pasting a lot of information from NextCloud.

These actions are all done by hand, which requires a lot of time & energy and is prone to errors. We are trying to create a solutions for this to automate these action.

(As we are trying to create app that is a real edge-case app within NextCloud, we don't expect the solution within the deck-app but would be nice to have some little improvements to make it more durable & expandable.)

[vdiezel]

Having a very related request!

We want to use the Events-API (because notify-push-client and Activity-API were not suitable here for several reasons) to run some code after something has happened (e.g. call another API) for a deeper integration into our platform.

I've just setup a simple NextCloud App that will relay those events (https://git.wechange.de/gl/code/wechangenotifier) into our platform and I run into the same limitation of the CardUpdatedEvent, the missing cardBefore on most of them.

It could be a low hanging fruit to pass the cardBefore whenever possible as this would also be mostly a backwards compatible change. This would allow to at least write some logic to understand what has changed exactly which is currently not possible for changes to cards that do not go through the CardService.update-call, like changing assigned users. We are using only a very limited set of events, so cannot say much about the rest.

A further step could be using a more granular approach as @stpronk describes it.

I would be willing to contribute.

[grnd-alt]

@stpronk @vdiezel thank you both a lot for your input on this :D. It's definitely worth it to add the before attribute wherever we can. I will happily review future PRs coming up to resolve issues around this :D

[stpronk]

@grnd-alt I've started to look into the board events and I see that the id is passed through rather then the whole entity itself as seen in some other events. I expect that the preferred way is to send through the whole entity but I don't know the impact of that change on other apps.

Should I keep it backwards compatible as much as possible? Or should I just update this to keep consistency?

[luka-nextcloud]

I'm not sure if it has any impact, but we should probably keep it backward compatible