This is a forwarding of an interesting session-related discussion between Andy and I... it covers the idea of storing session states as "snapshots" at a particular time, later allowing users to select a session state. This is useful if you wish to allow users to make incremental changes to data in a session and "bookmark" a session state for later copying into the current session. This is something that the "bare" session tracking stuff won't do for you, although it can facilitate it tremendously. Input welcomed! - C ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andy McKay" <andym@ActiveState.com> To: "Chris McDonough" <chrism@digicool.com> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 1:56 PM Subject: Re: [Zope-dev] Storing session objects in a ZODB
I think you may be trying to use sessions to do something that sessions don't do. You can *use* the sessioning machinery as a base to build the infrastructure to do such a thing, but it won't do it out of the box. I am currently trying to build an "onSessionStart" and "onSessionEnd" event into session data objects. If you had this capability, an arbitrary Python method (or DTML method or external method) could be called when a session data object is created and when it expires. If you were to make use of these hooks to copy the state of the session data object into another structure (related to the currently logged in user - a "checkpoint" if you will), you could build a catalog of session states that could be recopied into the current session namespace.
Alternately, you could forego the use of events and just have a button that says "save session state" somewhere, and copy the contents of the session namespace into something else. Then when a user wanted to choose a session state, copy it back into the current session namespace. This is the same idea, it just lets the user be explicit about what session state he wants to use instead of depending on the event hook to create a new state.
Bingo, yes that's it!
Does this make sense? Can I cc this to Zope-Dev so we can get some discussion about it?
Absolutely!
-- Andy McKay.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris McDonough" <chrism@digicool.com> To: "Andy McKay" <andym@ActiveState.com> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 9:53 AM Subject: Re: [Zope-dev] Storing session objects in a ZODB
Andy,
I'm still not sure why you wouldn't set up an external data
container..
if
you want, you can call me at 540-371-6909 if you think you can explain it better over the phone...
- C
----- Original Message ----- From: "Andy McKay" <andym@ActiveState.com> To: "Chris McDonough" <chrism@digicool.com> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 12:28 PM Subject: Re: [Zope-dev] Storing session objects in a ZODB
Well each user rummages through a site and saves preferences, I use these preferences for displaying things in a certain manner, generating SQL etc. Since some of these SQL statements get quite complex, it would be nice to be to able to pull saved session x which has a query that "looks up by x by y excluding z" etc...
So anyway I like using the ZODB for this kind of storage since it's of low volume and a large amount of reads and the users want to use acquisition to the full (we have a wacky hierarchy). If I could pull that into a text area to allow level editing then that would be an added bonus...
Did that make sense? -- Andy McKay.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris McDonough" <chrism@digicool.com> To: "Andy McKay" <andym@ActiveState.com> Sent: Monday, January 29, 2001 5:49 PM Subject: Re: [Zope-dev] Storing session objects in a ZODB
> Sure but users want to be able acess and manipulate the stored session > objects, without them being loaded... Im going for a bike ride to think > about this one.
Erm. What? :-) Can you give me an example?