[Grok-dev] Re: applyChanges and add forms

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Martijn Faassen wrote:
> Philipp did a refactoring of the form structure a while ago, and one of 
> the things he did was make applyChanges useable in add forms. But I ran 
> into a snag that might give us insight in what applyChanges should 
> really be doing for us in the context of grok.AddForm.

[snip]

> This is because applyChanges in formlib tries to retrieve the data from 
> the content object before it saves. This is to determine whether to 
> actually change the field at all, and to set a 'changed' flag that's 
> returned - if the underlying content object already has these values, no 
> changes happen and nothing needs to be done.
> 
> This is nice in case of edit forms, but it blocks this usage of 
> AddForms. Of course, in fact I lied in the above code. I claimed that 
> MyContent implements the schema IMyContent but I do no such thing. I 
> intuitively expected applyChanges help me make sure that this happened, 
> but perhaps this is not the right pattern.

I too would expect applyChange to help me here.

> What can be do to make schema-driven content even simpler in Grok? 
> Having to do a special __init__ and typing all the fields again seems a 
> bother I'd like to avoid.

I agree. I'd say we want to enhance Zope's applyChanges to not expect 
the field value on the object. At least that's the most straight-forward 
thing I can think of -- and it would go along with what I expect from 
applyChanges.


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