On Tue, 2003-10-14 at 07:47, Ted holden wrote:

Dylan,

The thing one would really want to do with the set method for a global variable would be to allow a user to enter data from a form and set it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "global" in this context but you can set values from a form, no problem. Everything below is indented one level in from your class statement. ----- def __init__(self, ...) ... self._data = {} thank_you = DTMLFile('thanks', globals()) def form_proc(self, REQUEST): """ You must have a docstring here """ expected_fields = ['spam','ham','eggs'] for field in expected_fields: self._data[field] = REQUEST.form.get(field) self._p_changed = 0 return self.thank_you ------ Now all you need is to create a form that posts to object_name/form_proc and contains the right fields. This is a very simple example, but demonstrates several key concepts: 1. Basic validation. You don't *ever* want to just take whatever shows up... go looking for what you expect to find. 2. Tainted strings. Any user-supplied string that contains certain characters is marked as tainted. Using REQUEST.form.get marks it as untainted, while REQUEST.get leaves it as it is. 3. Docstrings. Zope will not publish a method unless it has a docstring and begins with an alphanumeric character (i.e., not an underscore). Unless a method conforms, it will not be possible for any user to request it directly. Unpublished methods can still be called by other objects. 4. Persistence. Zope maintains persistence on strings and numbers just fine, but has no way of knowing if a list or mapping has changed. The self._p_changed assignment marks your object as changed so that the persistence machinery can do its work. There are other ways of accomplishing this, but I wanted to make sure you didn't get much further along without at least hearing about it. 5. You can return dtml (or zpt) objects. Never use a product to create significant amounts of HTML... that's as bad a sin as using dtml for heavy logic. :-) Before you go much further, I'd *highly* recommend reading the Zope Developer Guide. Zope is a quirky beast and there are difficulties lying in wait. And if you're not already a Python wiz, I'd dig into that more deeply too... there's a lot of OO voodoo just below the surface here and if you're not already fluent in how that works, you'll miss a lot of what's possible. HTH... happy hacking! Dylan