Hi My post went by last month without any suggestions, and I am still looking for some assistance. So, I am rewording my questions. I am trying to grok the Catalog and CatalogAware classes. I don't quite understand how to map variables into it. Say for instance that I have two classes within my base class that contain different variables: * people class contains the variables name, birthday, and djname * event class contains the variables eventname, startdate, and dj_list Now, I want to be able to search for an "eventname", which would not need to look in the people class at all. I also want to be able to search for a dj, which would look in both classes for the variables "djname" and "dj_list", and bring back all the matches. How is it that these definitions are created? I have tried setting up my base class to inherit Catalog, which gave me no errors, but I don't think I initialized it correctly. I tried inheriting CatalogAware, which gave me strange results, but I could see it when I would add a search interface from the management screen. Do I need to create a seperate "catalog" for each class containing the variables for itself? Then the base class is somehow mapped to those classes' Catalogs? My product is mostly python, so dtml examples will not help. Thanks for any pointers! -e-