Ross Boylan wrote:
I have a log composed of sublogs, and so on. I would like for people to be able to see some kind of summary (e.g., short versions of the logs down n levels) on the screen and then click on one of interest and see a fuller display of it.
Is there a good way to do this using dtml?
I've thought of two approaches. The "standard" zope
having recently debugged company's zope server, i can safely say that there is no 'standard'.
way seems to be to make each log folderish, and give each entry an id. Then I can embed the address in the html. The problem with this is that I would have to make up the id's and add extra machinery that the logs don't really need.
I'm leaning toward a second approach, of getting an object id and putting it in the html. This also raises some issue.
you lost me. your problem with the first method is having ids for your log entries and your second method starts with getting ids for your objects. looking ahead, YIKES, you just went from can i do this in dtml to messing with python code in the guts of the ZODB. that was a SERIOUS leap. IMO i'd highly recommend against messing with the zodb stuff, _p_ attrs are supposed to be reserved. i understand you want to treat them as read only, but i wouldn't even go near it if it could be implemented easily otherwise or i had developed a strong masochistic tendency and already knew the zodb well (well enough to know the answers to the below questions).
This also raises some issue. * Will the id be stable in the face of the db potentially dematerializing objects underneath?
what id?
* If I use a persistent id (_p_oid, I think), will that be stable?
see above commentX2.
* (Also, I'll need to be sure everything has persisted, but I think I can do that by forcing a transaction end before getting the _p_oid).
transactions are important, but also telling it before hand that the object is dirty and needs to be saved. you might want to read jim's paper on the zodb. it and alot of other good material are linked from http://www.zope.org/Members/itamar/LearningZope/LearningZope.html
* Can I map from object id back to object? (_p_jar.something or other)
this is getting worse(scarier?) as i go on... i have no idea. consider also that a url is also a unique persistent object id that maps into the zodb, why your first method works.
* Will this be robust across database changes (minimally, from ZODB to ZEO)? * Will the object id consist of characters which can be embedded easily in html?
... there are alot of other ways to do this... of the top of my head you could always store log entries in a sql db. since you seem not adverse to doing it in python, despite your original question... so why not just write a python class for the log folder thats persistent, add some methods for managing/storing log entries in a some attr (maybe list of dicts) of the logfolder. write some dtml accessible accessor methods to the attrs. write a dtml page for summary and one for details. kapil