[Zope-CMF] [dev] type actions, views and aliases: a proposal

[Yuppie]

Hi!

Today is my proposal day. Here is the second one:


Context / Problem
=================

I'm still not happy with the limitations for type actions caused by 
getActionById and _getViewFor.

_getViewFor is used by the view() method to return the default view.


The view method allows to add a simple +'/view' to urls.

www.example.org/foo/view

is an alias for

www.example.org/foo/document_view
-or-
www.example.org/foo/newsitem_view
-or-
www.example.org/foo/whatever_the_default_view_is


But we can't get rid of these urls, because we can't use them in 
actions. If we would add an action like that,

{ 'id':'view',
   'name':'View',
   'action':'string:${object_url}/view',
   'permissions':(View,) }

there would be no way to find out that /view is an alias for 
/document_view, because actions are currently used to look up these 
method aliases.

getActionById does something similar, so this is what I propose:



Proposal / Solution
===================

I'd like to add a dictionary to TypeInformations that maps aliases to 
methods and is configurable TTW.

e.g.
{'view':'document_view',
  'edit':'document_edit_form',
  'metadata':'metadata_edit_form'}

That might look like redundant information, because right now we can get 
this information from the actions. But the need to store this 
information inside actions limits the use of actions right now and makes 
type actions different from other actions.

getActionById and _getViewFor could use that dict instead of actions. In 
fact they'll become useless:

A __before_publishing_traverse__ in PortalContent could do the mapping.
That allows to always use the defined aliases, e.g.:

www.example.org/foo/view
www.example.org/foo/edit
www.example.org/foo/metadata



Any thoughts? Comments are welcome.


Cheers,

Yuppie