-----Original Message----- From: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> To: Kevin Dangoor <kid@kendermedia.com> Cc: zope@zope.org <zope@zope.org> Date: Friday, September 03, 1999 2:29 PM Subject: Re: [Zope] Many Zope questions
"Kevin Dangoor" <kid@kendermedia.com> writes:
You would probably want to make the Quick Links bar a DTML Method. This makes it easy to include it wherever you wish.
<dtml-var quicklinks>
Ah ha! So any object (or at least documents and methods) can act as a variable? Neat!
The var tag actually renders whatever it is that you pass. It can render properties, DTML methods, External Methods written in Python, etc.
Question: How does <!--#var quicklinks> (as is found in the documentation) differ from <dtml-var quicklinks>? When should each be used?
I should have mentioned... Almost all of the existing doc uses the Zope 1.x syntax of <!--#tag --> This syntax is still legal, but <dtml-tag > is becoming the more preferred way of doing things.
While discussing variables, how does typing in Zope work? I know that properties have types. What I want to do is read in a date from a user with an input form and then compare that to, for instance, a date in a Gadfly database -- or even just an arbitrary date. How can I tell Zope (or Gadfly) that it's dealing with a date? I didn't seem to find any casting operators around anywhere.
Zope knows what types objects are. For example, if you do: <dtml-var "someDateProperty + 5" fmt="%m/%d/%y"> you will get the date five days later than the date stored in the property. Likewise, if you do: <dtml-var "someDateProperty + 'foo'"> I believe you'll get an error. (not sure what adding a string to a date would mean :)
If you do really want it in Zope, you could use XML-RPC or ZClient to update things via cron.
Where can I find documentation on these?
This is a fine question. I often look at the source code when I'm curious about something and can't find docs on that specific topic. The Zope source is very readable. Kevin