Michel, Thanks for the advice. I finally figured out how to stop my "leaking" with the judicious use of the <dtml-var BASE> tag in my path generating statements. I probably should have figured this out myself before posting to the list. Sorry to be asking such elementary questions. Chris
-----Original Message----- From: michel@localhost.localdomain [mailto:michel@localhost.localdomain]On Behalf Of Michel Pelletier Sent: Monday, September 13, 1999 6:09 PM To: cfassnacht@ssc.wisc.edu Cc: zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] Simplifying complex contexts/urls
Chris Fassnacht wrote:
I'm developing a site with Zope that has a lot of
interlinking between
objects, and after clicking around for a while, the context (aka, the url path in the browser's address display) gets really long and complex. So far, I haven't had any problems with it, but I do have two concerns.
1. It starts to look pretty ungainly. This doesn't bother me too much, but I don't know how users will respond.
2. There must be some limit on the length of the allowable url in the browser's display. What are the chances that an extended session of clicking around will run into that limit?
Who knows? I don't think the HTTP spec has a limit on URL length, it's probably implimentation defined.
So, I'm wondering if there's some way to automatically simplify a path to its most elemental form. For example, www.mysite.edu/main/topicA/topicB/topicC/topicA/topicB becomes www.mysite.edu/main/topicA/topicB.
In your app, they may produce the same results, but these are two different scenarios. These requests both have different 'acquisition paths' which will cause different things to happen (for example, even though two images may be the same image in the two paths, they would both have different absolute_url values, because absolute_url is built from the acquisition path).
I would suggest not allowing your application to build such complex queries if they are essentialy redundant and you are not using any particular feature that redundent paths give you (I can't think of one off the top of my head...). You might end up in a situation like:
http://www.mysite.com/main/topicA/topicA/topicA/topicA/...
Which can happen, but only if you build your app to 'leak' path elements.
-Michel