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Have you looked at the ExtFile object?

cheers,

Chris Yes. As I wrote, the product BASICALLY does this. Actually it reads the file, parses it and shows it's contents in the properties tab. When I write something like <dtml-var "myProduct.property1"> then I can access a part of the file.

Can't you use os.path.getmtime('path_to_file') to get the modification time of the file and reparse and reinsert it only if getmtime >= old_getmtime? cheers, oliver