how can I store the contents of a Zope XML documents' edit window externally. I tried exporting the xml doc object but the file that is created has loads of additional Zopeish XML tags.

Try the Local File System product. http://www.zope.org/Members/jfarr/Products/LocalFS Currently allows read-only access to files in the file system. The next version will allow read/write access. Let me know if this works for you.

Can I reference the editForm widows' contents of an object directly?

eg . if an objetcs Edit form window contained the following.

<mytag>data</mytag>

how can the above contents of the form be sent to a local file,say on the c: drive?

Currently you could write an external method to write the contents of an XMLDocument to disk. You would access the data by calling the document's toXML method. def save_XMLDocument(path, doc): f = open(path, 'w') f.write(doc.toXML()) f.close() -jfarr