Lennart, Thanks for the breakthrough. Your solution needed only the following trivial rewrite in order to work: <A HREF="<dtml-var expr="aq_parent.absolute_url()">/goDelete?item=<dtml-var id>"> A call to the script with context.manage_delObjects(item) worked beautifully and now I'm just adding some fluff to display a confirmation msg and a link back to the original tree. Chris, thanks for all your input on this problem. This may not be the most elegant solution (and its not ZPT anyway) but I think I can close the file on this particular gottcha. The final dtml method that I put together might be of use to other newbies who want to manage objects with a tree-view: <table width="67%"> <tr> <dtml-tree branches="publicObjects" skip_unauthorized="1" sort="title_or_id"> <td width="49%"> <dtml-if expr="meta_type == 'Folder'"><B></dtml-if> <IMG SRC="<dtml-var icon>"> <dtml-var title_or_id> <dtml-if expr="meta_type == 'Folder'"></B></dtml-if> </td> <dtml-if expr="meta_type != 'Folder'"> <td width="17%"> <a href="<dtml-var tree-item-url>/manage_propertiesForm"> Change properties </a></td> <td width="17%"> <A HREF="<dtml-var expr="aq_parent.absolute_url()">/goDelete?item=<dtml-var id>"> Delete item</A> </td> </dtml-if> </dtml-tree> </tr> </table> The only other piece is a scrit that is called when building the tree. The tree branches are generated by the following Python script only slightly modified from the Zope.org archives: """ Script (Python) ID: publicObjects Returns sub-folders and DTML documents """ results=[] for object in context.objectValues(['Folder', 'File']): if object.hasProperty('title') and object.title: results.append(object) return results For completeness sake here is goDelete: """ Script (Python) ID: goDelete(item) Deletes object """ context.manage_delObjects(item) print '<B>' + item + '</B> deleted.' return printed -----Original Message----- From: Lennart Regebro [mailto:regebro@nuxeo.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 4:34 PM To: Horak, Karl; zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] Programmatically deleting objects From: "Horak, Karl" <KEHORAK@sandia.gov>

<A HREF="goDelete?item=<dtml-var id>&delPath=<dtml-var expr="aq_parent.aq_parent.id">.<dtml-var expr="aq_parent.id">">

<dtml-call expr="REQUEST.delPath.manage_delObjects([REQUEST.item])"> (This generates an AttributeError stating 'str' object has no attribute 'manage_delObjects')

Yes, delPath is a request variable, and therefore a string. It seems to me that you want to delete the item that you are viewing, there "here" object, so to speak. All the information you need to identify which object that is, is the path. You can probably pass <dtml-var absolute_url> as the item. That should be enough. Possibly you need "absolute_url(relative=1)", I'm not sure.

<dtml-call expr="_.getitem(REQUEST.delPath).manage_delObjects([REQUEST.item])">

I don't seem why you call an DTML method to run python code. Use a python script instead. In the pythonscript youshould be able to use restricted traverse to find the object item, get it's aq_parent, and call manage_delObjects on it. However, even this is total overkill. :-) <A HREF="<dtml-var expr="aq_parent.absolute_url()+'myDeleteScript?item='+id">"> should give you a link pointing to http://foo.com/the/parent/object/myDeleteScript?item=objectid The myDeleteScript then simply calls context.manage_delObjects(item) That should do it. Do you really want to use DTML?