WWW Admin wrote:

many of our customers use microsoft access to store all their relevant company data. it seems tabula is what we need in order for our customers to publish their access based product directories. hopefully somebody at digital creations can answer these questions.

That's correct. Your customers would export their data as DBF files and upload them into a Z Table (the new name for Tabula).

i read on this list that tabula would be integrated into zope anybody know the time frame?

The guts of Z Table (the btree and indexing machinery) are in Zope 1.10, to be released early this week. However, these guts won't be documented or supported for a while, as we have quite a backlog documenting and supporting what's already there. Z Tables is already being made available to a limited audience of consulting customers. This allows us to keep the audience size under control and justify spending time on it.

will Z table be a subset of tabula (i.e. not offer the same features)?

Nope, Z Tables is Tabula.

our designers need to be able to predefine layouts (create templates) with the data originating from an access file. ideally the customer would just drop in a new access database file whenever his prices

This is the way our business directory product works. One example is at: http://starweb.digicool.com/Commerce/ The customer, three times a week, uploads database files.

or products change without affecting the rest of the website. any foreseeable problems here (i read that when you delete a tabula object it erases everything related to it)?

When you delete a Z Table folder everything goes with it. However, the database records are just objects in the Z Table folder, so they can be overwritten without destroying the HTML that presents it.

our zope system would most likely be an intel linux based machine tied to sybase. is tabula availible for linux?

The Collector on the Zope site (bug reports and feature requests) runs on Linux, as does the above URL. As long as you have Zope 1.10pr1 it won't matter where you run it. You can even move the Zope database files between operating systems and the Z Table will work fine. Here's a semi-public announcement of a sneak peak at Z Table docs. I put online an old version of the PDF file: http://www.zope.org/Download/ZTables/ZTables.pdf I believe these are being updated (they don't talk enough about the wonderful indexing machinery, for instance). However, the updating isn't currently a high priority. --Paul

regards,

webman

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