[Zope-PTK] Re: Wizards

[kamon.ayeva@bureauveritas.com]

Hi all,

Extracts from the discussion between (Andrew M. Kuchling, Bill Anderson &
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.

I also agree.

> 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.
>

[KA]Summarizing requirements below:
>
>      (1)* You want to be able to sanity-check the fields after each step,
> staying at the same step until the fields have reasonable values.
>
>      (2)* 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.)

>[RH added](3)Generalized Session Object would provide a good starting
point.
>

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

[KA added](7)User gets small structures (categories) of links (from a
ressources directory à la DMOZ) and populates them to his member folder.
There is a product developed by Stefane Fermigier for www.portalux.com that
we want to use this way. Maybe this is a specific use of (6) ?

If this discussion was to materialize in a development effort, I would also
be interested in participating in the process.

Greetings.
Kamon
Usability is a key issue