[Grok-dev] Re: browsing and modifying persistent objects in zodb

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

cstrong at arielpartners.com wrote:
> I apologize in advance as I am sure this is probably a FAQ.
> 
> At my day job, I have an application connected to an Oracle database.
> One of the screens displays "requests entered today"
> I was doing some testing and noticed the table was empty, but remembered
> it was full yesterday.
> So, I just jumped into SQL Navigator and changed the "submit date" for all
> the requests entered yesterday to day = day + 1
> Back in my screen, voila!  all my data appears.
> 
> I can do that since this is a DEV environment and I have the privilege and
> it is all just for testing.
> 
> That got me thinking how could I do the equivalent thing for a Grok
> application using ZODB for all its persistence?
> 
> I envision an automatically generated page that introspects the app, finds
> the objects, walks the relationships, and displays view/edit pages
> automatically generated enabling the user to change object data in
> arbitrary ways.
> 
> Obviously that would be a super-user only thing, probably dev mode only.
> 
> I vaguely recall something like this being discussed some time ago on
> zope3-dev.  I believe that Ruby on Rails does something like this.

Django has something very similar as well.

> Does anyone know the status of this use case?

We would like to have something like that. Introspection is being worked 
on as part of the GSOC program, but we're also looking at the 
modification use case. Basically, what you're looking for (and we, too!) 
is a simple CRUD management interface for the data, independent of any 
screens that the developer might have written. I believe Martijn and 
Joachim Schmitz worked on something like this called megrok.crud (an 
extension to Grok) at the Grokkerdam sprint.