Can someone give me a pointer to what these helper classes actually do? Can I use them to setup lists and dictionaries that will be used over the lifetime of the Zope server? This is an example from an external method that Pavlos posted a while back. class MCQ: ''' helper class for MCQ system''' def __init__(self, score): ''' constructor''' self.score = 0 self.total_score = 0 What I would like to do is load up a template_lookups dictionary with quite a few entries; for template_id in self.Actors.RENDER.objectIds(): renderer = eval("self.Actors.RENDER.%s" % template_id) template_lookups[template_id] = renderer Thing is, I need access to the ZODB in one of my methods later in the module and so the above code doesn't work (too many 'selfs'!). Anyone got any ideas? tone. ------ Dr Tony McDonald, FMCC, Networked Learning Environments Project http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/ The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 222 5888 Fingerprint: 3450 876D FA41 B926 D3DD F8C3 F2D0 C3B9 8B38 18A2