----- Original Message ----- From: Chris Withers <chrisw@nipltd.com>
I agree the path from root to an object, with no aquisition, is unique, but only per instance of zope...
I was thinking along the lines of a CORBA POID which, AFAIK, uniquely identifies an object on a global scale. Could Zope do something similar?
Well, here's hoping it makes it into 2.2, I'd be interested to here people's views on the CORBA POID idea though...
There are generally two ways (at least) to think about "object identifiers". You can think of them as unique labels for specific objects, without regard for location ("Jim Fulton") or as addresses or slots in which objects can be found ("the CTO"). In this case, an advantage to using the address stance is that it obeys the Zope pattern of keeping objects in context. A path always identifies a single object, along with a set of parents. An OID-derived object could have several paths (or no path at all!), and it would be difficult to extract any of them, given the bare object. In the case of Catalogs, much of the time we're probably not interested in cataloging "whatever lives at this path address"; we want information about a specific object. Fortunately, the cut/copy/paste and rename implementations make the path approach workable. As a matter of fact, the new mountable database code required changing the clipboard operations to use paths instead of object monikers. Cheers, Evan @ digicool & 4-am