On Mon, 2002-11-04 at 20:09, Skip Montanaro wrote:

This part is frustrating. Stuff seems to be scattered all over the place. Part of my frustration is that when I find something that looks promising I generally have to figure out what the page template equivalent of a dtml example is. I really don't want to wade into dtml again. I used it for a few years outside of Zope and didn't like it.

Uh huh. Stuff is scattered all over the place. The Zope Book is a best-effort attempt at bringing a lot of it together.

Chris> Were you successful at accessing your Zope objects in a Python Chris> prompt?

Yes, thanks. I can get to the static stuff without too much trouble using the medusa/monitor_client script. It's a tad frustrating to not have readline, but I guess that's the price I have to pay for using a canned install on a not-quite-yet wrung out platform (MacOSX). Perhaps I can coax IPython or pyrepl into working for me. I haven't yet tried submitting a form with several fields. I anticipate that will be tedious.

You can have readline and whatnot by following the steps I outlined in my last email instead of going in to the monitor client. If you're using ZEO, you can even be connected to a database that is currently in use by a running Zope instance. It's particularly nice if you run Zope under emacs shell-mode and have Ken Manheimer's pdbtrack installed. When a pdb session is fired up, it tracks the progress of the code in a separate window.

Is there some way I can make dir() and type() available to scripts for development purposes and make sys importable once again?

Not without hacking source, but if you go into ZOPEHOME/lib/python/RestrictedPython, you can add them to the "safe_builtins" module-level global. This is not recommended. Instead, use an external method or write a Python product. See the Zope Developer's guide on how to write a Python product and the Zope Book 2.6 edition on how to write an external method. - C

On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 11:55, Skip Montanaro wrote:

The version of Python 2.1 which ships with the Plone MacOSX installer doesn't have a readline module with it, and doesn't seem to have shipped with complete sources, so it seemed like six of one half a dozeon of the other to me. I've just built a readline.so using a source version of 2.1.3.

Ah ok.

That seems to work. I don't understand how your scheme works to talk to a running Zope instance though. I don't have ZEO and by the time I can figure out how to install and use it, I suspect I will have fumbled around enough with the monitor client to figure out what I need.

The monitor client is pretty crippled (I suspect you'll see this once you start really using it) because of its traceback output and whatnot (truncated tracebacks, from what I remember). To avoid this, I recommend "importing Zope" in an interactive Python session instead. "cd lib/python; python; import Zope; app = Zope.app()". The only problem with this is that Zope cannot be running at the time you do this unless you're running ZEO. If you really want to inspect a running Zope, I have to recommend spending the time to install ZEO. It's really very easy to install if you follow the instructions in the tarball within http://www.zope.org/Products/ZEO/ZEO-2.0.tar.gz/view .

>> Is there some way I can make dir() and type() available to scripts >> for development purposes and make sys importable once again?

Chris> Not without hacking source,

That seems a helluva a lot easier than some of the other hoops I'm having to jump through.

Hope it works out.

...

From where I sit it seems Zope needs some serious work on its debugging capabilities. At a minimum, giving people the option of starting up Zope with a flag that returns control of their Python interpreter to them would be a good first step.

This is the "cd lib/python; python; import Zope; app = Zope.app()" trick that I mention above and I've sent in other emails. Upcoming versions of Zope will likely ship with a utility to make this less obscure by providing a frontend controller application to Zope named "zctl" that you can run to do this by doing "./zctl debug". This feature is currently in-place in a branch of Zope I'm doing work on (chrism-install-branch). - C

Is there some way I can make dir() and type() available to scripts for development purposes and make sys importable once again?

As Chris said, you need an external method (due to security concerns). Just like this: 1. Create the following script: # helpers.py def dir_this(ob): return dir(ob) def type_this(ob): return type(ob) 2. Save the preceeding script 'helpers.py' in the 'Extensions' folder of your Zope instance. 3. In the root of the Zope Management Interface (ZMI) add an External Method with the id of the first of the two methods you need. (You may use a different id as well): id: dir_this title: any title module name: helpers (without the extension) function: dir_this 4. Repeat the same thing for 'type_this' 5. Now you're ready to use dir() and type() within your code: PythonScript: context.dir_this(object) context.type_this(object) DTML: <dtml-var "dir_this(object)"> <dtml-var "type_this(object)"> 6. Last but not least, make sure only managers have access to these methods, at its 'Security' tabs. Ausum

You might benefit from the following: http://www.zope.org/Members/4am/XXXPythonScripts hth, -Casey On Tuesday 05 November 2002 12:17 pm, Skip Montanaro wrote:

>> Is there some way I can make dir() and type() available to scripts >> for development purposes and make sys importable once again?

Thanks for the external method tutorial. Worked like a charm.

Ausum> As Chris said, you need an external method (due to security Ausum> concerns).

But why can't Zope let me decide what my security tradeoffs are? It's fine that I can't execute any of

dir(foo) type(foo) foo.__class__

by default, but why can't there be some simple way to say, "I'm debugging and I know what the risks are. Give me an interpreter that isn't crippled." Adding dir() and type() back in were trivial edits, but making foo.__class__ available is more difficult than just messing with checkAttrName. (Thankfully, an external method worked here.)

-- Skip Montanaro - skip@pobox.com http://www.mojam.com/ http://www.musi-cal.com/

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