Your question has a small ambiguity - what do you mean by file? From the rest of your question I assume you mean an object containing text, where the object could be a dtml document. Anyway... The gurus will say you are mixing logic with content - put the logic in a python script. So suppose you have a dtml document containing your list you could access it like this (adapted from a script by dlkita on ZopeLabs), call it (say) myList: from Products.PythonScripts.standard import DTML request = container.REQUEST RESPONSE = request.RESPONSE myString = '<dtml-var file_name>' # "Coerce" into a DTML-object myDTML = DTML(myString) # Return the rendered DTML by *calling* the DTML-object, # in this case myDTML. context is the namepace - IMPORTANT theText = myDTML(context, request, RESPONSE) lines = string.split(theText, '\n') for line in lines: (subject, email) = string.split(line, ',') print 'Subject=%s, Email=%s' % (subject, email) return printed Clearly you can adapt this to print the drop-down list. Then in your form you just plug in the list with a simple statement: <dtml-var myList> which keeps your form a lot clearer. Cliff Brokken, Allen P. wrote:

I am working on a very simple "feedback" type form for my site. I realize this can be achieved with the collector or other intermediately complex means, but for this site I need something very light weight and simple. All I need is a table of "Subject","Email address" to be read from a file rather than hiding the values in the form. Basically the method that renders the form reads the file and picks up the subjects to make a drop down, then when submitted it matches the subject to the appropriate email address. If it's not a valid subject it drops the request, and only sends email to the right person. If this were perl on a traditional web server I would have done this in like 60 seconds. As it is I can't figure out how to read in the data from the text file so it goes into an array properly. I was hoping it might be as simple as doing

file_name

subject1,email1@host.com

subject2,email2@host.com

subject3,email3@host2.com

method

... Form header and fields

<select>

<dtml-call file_name>

<dtml-in file_name>

<dtml-let keytosplit=sequence-item

feedback_name="_.string.split(keytosplit, ',')[0]"

email_address="_.string.split(keytosplit, ',')[1]">

<option value="<dtml-var feedback_name>"><dtml-var feedback_name></select>

</dtml-let>

</dtml-in>

However it treats file_name as a string and won't let me <dtml-in> over that. Is there a way to easily convert the contents of the file to a line by line input for a <dtml-in >statement, or some other quick and dirty way to do this? I've come up with some more complex ways with adding a header character to each line to split on, with some form of loop through it all, but turning the other file into a set for <dtml-let> seems to be the most straight forward way to do it.

I've come up with half a dozen other ways to handle this that include MySQL, or other products, but I really would like it to be as simple as possible with as few external dependencies as possible.

---

Allen Brokken

IAT Services - ISAM

University of Missouri

brokkena@missouri.edu

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_______________________________________________ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )