Thanks Philip

The way Ty and I usually handle "object" properties is to give an object setter methods (e.g. "setAddress()") that simply set the property (e.g. self.Address = addr). The only downside is that you have to do this in a Python base class or an External method. Later, we expect to replace this approach with PropertyHandlers, and we already have a primitive form of PropertyHandler we have used with some success, but it's too crude at this point for a product release.

I presume if most of my classes are ZClasses external methods should do the job and then I can just call the setter methods when the object is created or modified?

I have created ObjectManager and Folder dataskins before and had them work, but at the time I was testing with Zope 2.1.6, and it was an older version of ZPatterns. I haven't done much lately with them. If people are experiencing problems, perhaps someone could send me a bug report?

If I do try out this route (in stead of using setter methods) where does the content of the ObjectManager reside - sometimes I struggle with the locality of objects when working with ZPatterns. Eg. I have a CustomerManager specialist that creates Customers (Objectmanager Dataskin) and that should contain an address dataskin. I guess a simple prodding of the namespace should do the trick but are not to clear on how this should be done? guessing (but the manage_addProduct part is probably not right): <dtml-let ni="newitem(id)"> <dtml-with ni> <dtml-with "manage_addProduct['MyProduct']"> <dtml-call "MyZClass_add(_.None, _, NoRedir=1)"> </dtml-with> </dtml-with> </dtml-let> Roché ------------- Sleep for entertaiment Willow http://www.dreamscapes.co.za