I'm pretty sure getattr will trigger the Acquisition machinery, I don't know if hasattr does. Might be better to unwrap the object first before checking.

heh, opportunity to spout out my deep zope knowledge ;-) hasattr(object, string) The arguments are an object and a string. The result is 1 if the string is the name of one of the object's attributes, 0 if not. (This is implemented by calling getattr(object, name) and seeing whether it raises an exception or not.) (leeched from the ZMI online help) cheers, oliver