I am answering my own question so the next person who bumps into it
might have more luck tracking it down.  The following examples are
taken from the 'Security' chapter of the Zope Developers Guidde (ZDG). 
Note that I still wish there were a way to use external objects
unchanged.  Particularly because I have a class heirarchy, where
customer objects create campaignh objects, but I want to to return
campaign objects that have zope security info, so I have to create
instances of my zopified objects from the non-zope objects...very
wasteful and slow.  


--sam


<fontfamily><param>Courier</param><x-tad-bigger># an external method
that returns Book instances


from AccessControl import ClassSecurityInfo

from Acquistion import Implicit

import Globals


class Book(Implicit):


  def __init__(self, title):

    self._title=title


  # Create a SecurityInfo for this class

  security = ClassSecurityInfo()

  security.declareObjectPublic()


  security.declarePublic('getTitle')

  def getTitle(self):

    return self._title


Globals.InitializeClass(Book)


# The actual external method

def GetBooks(self):

  books=[]

  books.append(Book('King Lear').__of__(self))

  books.append(Book('Romeo and Juliet').__of__(self))

  books.append(Book('The Tempest').__of__(self))

  return books

</x-tad-bigger></fontfamily>


Or, if you can't modify the original object, try this:


<fontfamily><param>Courier</param><x-tad-bigger># an external method
that returns Book instances


from AccessControl import ClassSecurityInfo

from Acquisition import Implicit

import bookstuff

import Globals


class Book(Implicit, bookstuff.Book):

  security = ClassSecurityInfo()

  security.declareObjectPublic()

  security.declarePublic('getTitle')


Globals.InitializeClass(Book)


# The actual external method

def GetBooks(self):

  books=[]

  books.append(Book('King Lear'))

  books.append(Book('Romeo and Juliet'))

  books.append(Book('The Tempest'))

  return books

</x-tad-bigger></fontfamily>

On Apr 27, 2004, at 6:26 PM, Sam Gendler wrote:


<excerpt>I used to be a fairly knowledgable zope user many years ago,
but things have moved on and I've forgotten most of what I know.  I
have a largish library of python modules which define a number of
classes which have methods that perform work in a product.  Currently,
much of the system is managed vai commandline tools which utilize the
library.  We want to ad a web interface, and I figured zope would be a
natural, since everything is already in python.


I created external methods which return instances of classes, but if I
try to use those instances from within dtml (iterating over a list of
them, for instance), I just get prompted for authentication
credentials.  I seem to recall that there was some way of applying
zopishness to external object instances at runtime, but I can't
remember what that mechanism is, and I couldn't find it in either the
zope book or the zope bible I went out an bought.


For example, if I have a customer class which has name, id, and
revenue members, and I create an external method to return a list of
customer instances, I cannot do the following


<<dtml-in extListCustomers prefix="cust">

<<dtml-var expr="cust_item.id"> <<dtml-var expr="cust_item.name">
<<dtml var expr="cust_item.revenue">

<</dtml-in>


Thanks


--sam



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