The current issue of "Zope Guru of the Week" has closed: =================================================================== Issue #5 -- Rendering DTML in Properties =================================================================== Status: Closed Zen Level: Disciple (3/8) Keywords: DTML ZClasses Submitted by: Chuck Burdick chuck.burdick@tradingtechnologies.com ------------------------------------------------------------------- This problem occurs when you try to make a DTMLDocument-ish ZClass. 1. Suppose you have created a ZClass that you call 'myClass'. 1. Give 'myClass' a property sheet called 'properties'. 1. Create a text property called 'content' on 'properties'. 1. Create a view to edit 'properties'. 1. Create an instance of 'myClass'. Q: If you put dtml tags in 'content', how can you render the object and interpret the tags? For example, suppose you created 'index_html' as a DTMLMethod in 'myClass' as:: <dtml-var standard_html_header> <dtml-var content> <dtml-var standard_html_footer> This will not work. It will display the text value of 'content' but the dtml tags will not have been evaluated. This is a problem I frequently encounter. I do not want to create a complicated subclass of the existing DTMLDocument classes. Instead, I want a quick-and-dirty ZClass in which DTML tags are valid. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Reviewed by: Tres Seaver tseaver@palladion.com ------------------------------------------------------------------- What, no valiant Zopemeister would step up to the plate? OK, here is my take on the problem. Short Answer You can't do this "quick and dirty". Long Answer Standard DTML and Python methods do not have direct access to the DTML rendering machinery, which lives in $ZOPE_HOME/lib/python/DocumentTemplate/DT_HTML.py and in $ZOPE_HOME/lib/python/DocumentTemplate/DT_String.py. A quick scan of those files convinced me completely that I wasn't going to replicate it in a Python method or two. So how do you accomplish your goal? The simplest technique would be to morph your ZClass so that it inherits from ObjectManager -- you can then stash the 'content' field's DTML into a DTML Document, say 'content_dtml', contained within the instance, and render it from your 'index_html' with the exact syntax you specified. You might even be able to use the same user interface as your first cut: in the form processing method, for instance, you could add:: <dtml-call "content_dtml.manage_upload( content )"> Another answer involves hacking the dtml-var tag to allow for a 'fmt=dtml' parameter, which would then do the recursive rendering of the property value. -------------------------------------------------------------------