[Grok-dev] Grok/Zope Technologies for State Machine

[Paul Wilson]

2008/11/1 Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 00:41, Paul Wilson <paulalexwilson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> To recap, the configuration of states should be 'viewable', i.e. I'd
>> like to have views that configure how states behave during the
>> system's execution. From what I've read, views export models, and
>> models are objects. So my natural conclusion was that I should have my
>> states be models and write views for them. I then reasoned that
>> updates to the states should be persistent, and therefore states be
>> stored in my ZODB. I can't store a class in there, so I decided to
>> create an object from the state and load it.
>
> Sure. That means you want to have a set of persistent state objects in
> the ZODB that you can change the configuration for. But for that you
> don't need to have one class per state. You only need one state class,
> and then you create one instance per state and store them in the ZODB.
>
>> Since states can have
>> different initialization parameters depending on where they are in the
>> execution or what statemachine runtime is executing it, i don't really
>> want to call __init__ on it, just __new__ to create the state.
>
> Creating new objects from the objects? Even if that works, it' very strange. :)
> If you need new objects, make the persistent objects factories, and
> call a method on them to create the actual state objects, of a
> different class.
>
>> Instead, I suppose I should create a parameter object that is
>> persistent that gets passed into the state when it is about to be
>> used. States can then be designed to receive such an object at
>> initialization time.
>
> That works too, but having the persistent objects (which could be
> local utilities) be factories is a more common pattern in the Zope
> world.
>

Okay. That makes sense; each state is a persistent factory object. I'd
have a play with the concept and see how it fits... Since it is a
common pattern in the zope world, do you know of any examples that I
could take a look at?

Thanks,
Paul