--- Chris McDonough <chrism@digicool.com> wrote:

I sympathize with the need to convert all your scripts over to use sessioning from hidden form-field encoding and the like... I'd really appreciate some input as to what kinds of problems you're trying to solve with sessioning.

I don't have any great number of scripts to convert. I've only been looking at zope for a few weeks. I DO have a significant application that handles a customer database, supplier ordering, inventory management and the like. This is currently written in Perl/cgi, and is way too slow and cumbersome. I'd like to move it into zope and at the same time make the database directly available to customers. In the current implementation of the application I maintain a lot of state at the server side--the server knows the page history, locally configured options, and the like. In that application I actually force you to use server-side navigation, since I load over the existing page every time you make a request (so there is only one page ever resident in the browser). I did this to make it impossible for the operator to use an old browser page (with stale form info). This is ugly and requires two round-trips for each request. I'm trying to figure out how to move this into zope, and to do this in the most natural way possible. So I'd like to give up mostly on the server-side navigation stuff. But I do want to do things like: if you go from a main page to a form, then if the form succeeds I'd like to return you directly to the main page (with no extra page fetch). If the form fails, it might go back to the main page, or include the error somewhere in the main page. Since the form is likely to be unrelated to the main page (just linked to from it), I need at least some server state to tell me where to return. I can also imagine doing side trips from forms--but that's harder, because then the side trip can't involve a link, otherwise you lose the information typed in (I "solved" this in my current implementation by wrapping *every* page in one big form and making all the links actually do submits, using a little javascript, but again that's something I'd rather avoid--I'd rather it was simple and relatively unsurprising). I'm unclear as to how I should really implement any of this. It almost seems like there is some sort of abstraction here that can be turned into a generic facility, but I haven't groked zope enough to figure out how that would be plugged in and what it would look like. So anyway, this was supposed to be an answer to your question, but it's really a thinly disguised attempt to get some design help on this. Is there another forum purely for design help with this sort of thing? How to fit a particular navigational abstraction into the zope framework? Thanks, Bob __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos - Share your holiday photos online! http://photos.yahoo.com/