[Zope-PTK] ZWiki summary of Wizard goals and requirements discussion

[Andrew M. Kuchling]

Andrew Wilcox writes:
>removing duplicatation.  Take a look, and update!
>    http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/ZWiki/WizardDesignContest

Pretty good, though many of the issues are portal-specific ones.  For
example, the first one is "A user should be able to use a wizard to
edit an object, as well as add one."  But there can be wizard
applications that don't create anything; imagine wizards that help you
debug a problem by stepping through a bunch of screens, and doing a
combination of automated tests and querying the user ("Did you receive
an e-mail?").  I'd drop goals #1, #6, #7 and the final two goals. #4
and #5 would belong in a Wizard Style Guide, but aren't really
software enforceable.  

Goal #3 is a more general transactional problem; a wizard may be doing
arbitrary things (creating ZODB objects, SQL database tables, etc.)
but you don't want to leave half-created things lying around,
particularly if the user says "to hell with this" and just goes away,
leaving a dangling wizard session.  I think this isn't practically
fixable until there's a canonical session tracking mechanism within
Zope.  (Even then it may be impossible, but the session problem needs
to be fixed.)

-- 
A.M. Kuchling			http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/
A pig can learn more tricks than a dog, but has too much sense to want to do
it.
  -- Robertson Davies, _The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks_