Hello, I have a bit of a hairy requirement: I need to extend the catalog to find content that exists outside of Zope (more or less, hard to explain without getting into details). The idea is that everytime a site search is executed, at the same time a web-service type call should be made to a seperate server, which also returns a lists of results (XML encoded). I would like to be able to "amalgamate" both into a single list of search results. So, what I thought is, I could hack the underlying catalog code (the search() method of Catalog.py) to add some functionality that would execute the search, take the XML results, parse it, and append the results to the LazyMap instance. I would now have a single list of search results for both types of searches. Also, I'm pretty sure this can be achieved through a monkey patch, so it's fairly portable and separate from the Zope core. (Though admitedly I'm not sure I understand the LazyMap/LazyCat thing too well just yet). Now when all this is done, I need to make sure that getObject() can work on those custom results, and that proper attributes/methods are in place (at a minimum to do what I need, which is just 2 or 3 calls), which brings me to the second part of the question: non-persistent classes. I need to have instances of a class that aren't stored or permanent, they exist only if getObject() is called (Which it is,though I wonder if I could get rid of that). Exactly how do I do such a thing? I'm not even sure! I've allways created my product classes by inhertiting from other classes! I'm pretty sure that's not what I want to do here, first of all because this class would be fairly unique, and because I'm pretty sure if I did (from, say CMF Document), it would inherit it's persistent properties. Does anyone have an example of such a class ? I've seen references to a "Base" or "SimpleItem" class, but I'm not clear on these, so I'd rather get an informmaed opinion on this. Oh, and BTW, some of you are probably wondering why not index the results in the catalog ... Well, I suppose I could ... One problem is there are LOTS of items to index, it would grow the catalog quite large and slow it down ... the web service comes out of a fairly optimized oracle, MUCH faster. Though I may try this if I can't accomplish the first part of the work. Either way, I'll need these non-persistent classes. Oh, and Deiter, thanks for the thing on ZPT's equivalent to HTML(), I'll be testing it out soon :) Any help, tips, commments, or alternative suggestions would be MUCH appreciated ... Thanks in advance, Jean-François Doyon Internet Service Development and Systems Support GeoAccess Division Canadian Center for Remote Sensing Natural Resources Canada http://atlas.gc.ca Phone: (613) 992-4902 Fax: (613) 947-2410