Philip:
Ty and I were planning to solve this problem in ZPatterns at some point, but taking a somewhat different approach. Our idea was to address the issue through the RIPP model PropertyHandlers. PropertyHandlers are like methods that have methods - so if an object had a date value called StartDate, you could do something like object.StartDate.HTMLeditor() to get an HTML snippet for editing that property, object.StartDate() to get the actual property value, and object.StartDate.set(data) to change the property. This makes the system wildly extensible, while keeping the ZPublisher type marshalling clean.
I agree totally. (One problem with adding new types to
the registry is that it's not very isolatable for virtual hostingish applications' security.) It's up to the PropertyHandler to determine how the data is marshalled to/from standard ZPublisher-supported types.
The other advantage to this approach is that it scales to properties which are actually relationships to other objects - for example, mapping a customer number property to establish a relationship with a customer object. Relationship PropertyHandlers actually delegate their display/editor rendering and input marshalling to the Specialist responsible for the kind of object the relationship "points to".
None of this exists in code yet; just thought I'd bring it up as an alternative approach.
I was about to write some of that, and then turned around and did a "mapping" to html display and edit "widgets" in DTML because that's what I know. Jason Spisak CIO HireTechs.com 6151 West Century Boulevard Suite 900 Los Angeles, CA 90045 P. 310.665.3444 F. 310.665.3544 Under US Code Title 47, Sec.227(b)(1)(C), Sec.227(a)(2)(B) This email address may not be added to any commercial mail list with out my permission. Violation of my privacy with advertising or SPAM will result in a suit for a MINIMUM of $500 damages/incident, $1500 for repeats.