Hello, I am no programmer, but I am dangerously lurking in the world of zope. So Newbie alert! Please bear with me if this is an inappropriate palace to post this. I am more than happy to take any behavioural tips as well as progromattic. I have been scouring manuals and documents for weeks before I have come to bug real people! I have started off with what I thought would be a pretty simple problem in order top get my head around zope. I want to make a product that allows users to collaboratively build a story line by line. When the user enters the product they are given a choice of alternative first lines left by other users, and they can choose one then be presented with a second set of lines which have been added to the first, of which they can choose any one... and so on. At any stage if they are not happy with a line they can submit their own. I have tried building this in Zope using the zodb, and using sql. In both cases I have run into similar problems. In zodb, lines get submitted, but do not seem to get catalogged til I manually force the catalog to update, as far as I can tell they are class aware. The half working vbersion of this can be seen at: http://194.80.197.3:8080/addaline/ I guess I want to have something that forces the catalog to uppdate itself, I have been using: <dtml-call reindex_object> in the method of the product that adds new class instances of the lines My second problem has been keeping a record for the user of the story as they have selected it up to that point. I thought of a structure which names the lines with a position. The first lines are named with just one letter ie "a" or "b". If a user adds another line to line "a" it will have the position "ab" and so on. I know that there are a limited number of chars available and I guess that was a problem I was going to try and sort out later. This way any line contains its history in its position. In the sql version if I do a query on a line 5 deep like this: select content from lines where position = '<dtml-var position size=1 etc="" >' OR position = '<dtml-var position size=2 etc="" >' OR position = '<dtml-var position size=3 etc="" >' OR position = '<dtml-var position size=4 etc="" >' OR position = '<dtml-var position size=5 etc="" >' I get all the lines up to that point. Of course this is hard wired. I'd like to have it so that it works something like this: select content from lines where <dtml-call "REQUEST.set('leng',_.len(position))"> <dtml-call "REQUEST.set('n', 0)"> <dtml-loop while n lt leng> <dtml-call "REQUEST.set('n', n+1)"> position = '<dtml-var position size=n etc="" >' OR </dtml-loop> position = '<dtml-var position size=leng etc="" >' (The one one the end doesn't have an OR so I left it out of the loop...) OK so I shudder to think how that looks to someone who knows python and zope!!! But I'd be so happy to see how it is meant to look. I haven't tried looping, so excuse my tag for it, I know that is wrong, but I have tried setting a varible based upon the length of a string, this worked in a normal DTML document: <dtml-call "REQUEST.set('leng',_.len('werte'))"> <br> leng=<dtml-var leng> but when I use it in a SQL query like this: <dtml-call "REQUEST.set('leng',_.len('werte'))"> select content from lines where position = '<dtml-var position size=1 etc="" >' OR position = '<dtml-var position size=2 etc="" >' OR position = '<dtml-var position size=3 etc="" >' OR position = '<dtml-var position size=4 etc="" >' OR position = '<dtml-var position size=leng etc="" >' it doesn't work. I am sure these are just the beginnings of my problems. This has been a steep learning curve, and I am determined not to give up. After I finish I would like to give a go at writing it up and add to the oyther useful documents out there. I am convinced that this is a great project to start learning zope with. Thanks for your time. Josh On www.crd.rca.ac.uk/~josh