Greetings. I'm looking for a little wisdom -- specifically, about thread locks and Zope. I'm developing a Python-based product. One of the classes needs to hand out unique IDs to clients as they connect for the first time. I generate these by keeping an index integer in the instance that starts at zero, incrementing it by one for every new client, and using the new value for the unique ID. In order to prevent race conditions when two clients connect almost simultaneously, I have another instance variable in my class that holds a threading.lock(). I call acquire() on that lock just before the increment-and-report code, and release() just after. So far so good. That seemed to work just fine yesterday when I coded it. Then I shut down Zope overnight and started it up again today. Now, I cannot create a new instance of the class without getting the Zope error "UnpickleableError: Cannot pickle <type 'thread.lock'> objects". (I'd swear it was working yesterday, though.) I thought "Okay, no problem. I'll just make the lock variable volatile, since I don't really care whether it persists when Zope shuts down." So I renamed the lock to begin with '_v_'. That solves my "UnpickleableError" problem nicely. Unfortunately, it introduces a different problem: the code that calls acquire() on the lock now throws "AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'acquire'". I'm sure I initialize that variable to a threading.Lock() in the object's __init__ method. So now I'm worried that Zope is doing all kinds of pickling-unpickling activity behind the scenes, and anything I have that's volatile can disappear without warning. Are there any thread-wise Zopistas out there who can steer me right? Thanks, ..Ian -- --- -- --- -- --- -- --- -- --- -- --- -- --- -- --- -- --- -- Dr. Ian Beatty beatty@physics.umass.edu Physics Education Research Group voice: 413.545.9483 Department of Physics fax: 413.545.4884 Univ. of Massachusetts AIM: (available upon request) Amherst, MA 01003-4525 USA http://umperg.physics.umass.edu/ -- --- -- --- -- --- -- --- -- --- -- --- -- --- -- --- -- --- --