[Grok-dev] proposal: grok.title() and grok.description()

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

Inspired by Tres's idea of grok.describe(), I'd like to propose two new 
grok directives:

grok.title()

and

grok.description()

The arguments to both is a unicode string or a message id: human 
readable text.

These directives should be usable on just about any class, ranging from 
Model to View to Permission.

The idea is then that an application's user interface can access this 
data (this means we need to come up with a good API to access this kind 
of grok-defined attribute in the grok module. Anyone have any ideas?). 
The application's UI can then use this information to display things 
like menus and add lists, or lists of permissions, etc, etc.

The idea is to standardize a simple mechanism for this that people can 
start using for their own purposes.

Of course, the admin UI can probably also productively use this 
information. If needed I could imagine some grok.info() directive or 
somesuch that contains only information to be used by the admin UI as 
opposed to information for end-user consumption (though docstrings might 
serve this purpose). The admin UI would of course also be able to use 
'title' and 'description' on the application object.

We need sensible defaults for these two attributes. grok.description() 
should default to grok.title(). What about grok.title()? I think it 
would be bad if grok.title() defaulted to the empty string, as these 
don't show up in the user interface and give no clue as to what object 
you're dealing with. I therefore propose grok.title() should default to 
the class name. This gives a good hint on what's going on in a user 
interface where someone hasn't spelled out grok.title() yet for a 
particular class, which can then be easily fixed.

What do people think?

Regards,

Martijn