Thanks for the suggestion, but I'd already looked through the DTMLtest code and tried that - here's what I got Sorry, an error occurred.<p> <PRE> Traceback (innermost last): File lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 877, in publish_module File lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 592, in publish (Info: /CDT/cdt/testpub) File lib/python/ZPublisher/Response.py, line 264, in setBody File lib/python/DocumentTemplate/DT_HTML.py, line 217, in __str__ (Object: <string>) File lib/python/DocumentTemplate/DT_HTML.py, line 211, in quotedHTML (Object: <string>) TypeError: argument 1: expected read-only buffer, ExplicitAcquirerWrapper found There must be some function which knows how to deal with the wrapper which dtml objects have when I grab them from self.objectItems('DTML Document'). Explicitly unwrapping them with str(foo) doesn't help much - I just get a quoted html representation. I'm still missing something here ! Kent Polk wrote:

In zope.misc, you wrote:

...

One of us is probably really missing something here.

...

The problem I'm wrestling with is the opposite - I can grab zope dtml objects in external methods, but I can't figure out how to call some mythical function render(foo) the way zope does - converting all the zope bits (such as <!--#var bar-->) into the same html that the zope ORB would. Any advice appreciated...

Maybe I'm still misunderstanding, but you can use Globals.HTML() to render a dtml 'string'. Take a look at DocumentTemplate/DTtest.py

Kent

-- Dr Ross Lazarus Associate Professor and Sub-Dean for Information Technology Faculty of Medicine, A27, R126a, University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia Tel: (+61 2) 93514429 Mobile: +61414872482 Fax: (+61 2) 93516646 Email: rossl@med.usyd.edu.au http://www.health.usyd.edu.au/people/rossl.htm