[Zope-PTK] Wizards

[Rik Hoekstra]

"Andrew M. Kuchling" wrote:
> 
> Back in February, Paul Everitt tried to raise a discussion about
> wizards (see
> http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-February/000361.html for
> the original post) but there was little interest.
> 
> I'd like to re-raise the issue, outside of the PTK, because the idea
> of wizards is useful outside of the PTK; consider a site with a
> multi-stage registration process where you have to fill out several
> screens of info.  Right now the Wizard ZClass is hiding inside the
> DemoPortal export file, but it might be worth promoting it into a
> standard component of Zope.
> 
> Currently Wizards are really simple; they're Folderish objects that
> can contain a bunch of DTML methods.  The methods are sorted by ID to
> produce the order in which they're traversed; for example, if you have
> methods named 'a', 'b', 'd', they'll be shown in that order.  Each
> method can contain <INPUT> tags, and the wizard will collect all the
> form inputs, hiding them in hidden variables in subsequent pages.
> 
> Some requirements I can think of:
> 
>      * You want to be able to sanity-check the fields after each step,
> staying at the same step until the fields have reasonable values.
> 
>      * Putting values inside hidden fields won't work well if one of
> the fields is large -- say, a 200K uploaded file.  Better to keep a
> server-side session that holds the field values.  (I think some sort
> of standard session tracking, or a standard hook for sessions, should
> be part of Zope, but that's a separate issue.)

Yes. THere once was some talk about unifying the interfaces for
FSSession and SQLSession between their developers (don't know if they're
listening). Don't know how this ended up. If it would come to something,
such a Generalized Session Object would provide a good starting point.

> 
> What other requirements would there be?  Does anyone have other
> potential applications for Wizards?
> 

What about wizards for coping with sql databases (with a query builder
as the simplest example). 
Or, more or less in the same vein, a catalog searcher for want of a
query language. 
Or a meta searcher (searches database, Catalogs and whatever), perhaps
even some sort of limited dataminer (Anthony Baxter once implemented
such a beast)?. 

Making structured (parts of) sites, and structured documents. In fact,
making custom 'management interfaces' for content managers. I'm
currently in the process of making something like this (not quite a
wizard, more complicated) for web supported teaching, and it's not too
difficult. 

The possibilities are endless, but the wizard product should be quite
flexible.

Rik