Here's something that's crying out for a HowTo. I'm sure there are many folks who would be interested in knowing more about creating PDFs from Zope using ReportLab.
There's been some talk of this, and some examples, on the ReportLab mailing list.
I don't generate PDFs from within Zope. I get Zope to write out a specification file into a directory on the filesystem. This directory is "watched" by a long running python process (the report generator), which looks in a number of directories on the server every 10 seconds to see if there are new files there.
These specification files are added to a queue in the report generation software. Reports are generated, and output into a directory that is visible to the outside world via Apache. The reports are given a long unique random filename.
Finally, the report generator notifies the Zope that requested the report that the report is ready, and of the filename the report is saved under.
When I start running out of disk space, I'll write a script that gets rid of old reports.
That's great Steve! If you one day find some time, would you like to write a tutorial on that? Thanks, Tom.