[Zope-CMF] Better MemberData search for CMF

[Florent Guillaume]

Hi,

[Please keep zope-cmf at zope.org in all Ccs]

We need a better search API for searching members in CMF. I want to be 
able to search on several attributes at the same time. I want to search 
on all existing members. I want it to be efficient.

Currently CMF's MemberDataTool has
   searchMemberData(search_param, search_term, attributes=())
but it can only do a search on one attribute. It returns a list of 
dictionaries.

CMFLDAP's MemberDataTool inherits the one from CMF, and so actually does 
the search only in cached members. This is a big problem for me.

Plone (in MembershipTool) has
   searchForMembers(**kw)
that could search on arbitrary attributes but actually only does it on 
name, email, roles, and last_login_time. It returns a list of user objects.

CMFLDAP's PloneLDAPMembershipTool seems to be more intelligent than its 
MemberDataTool and do the full LDAP search, but I'm not sure.


I'd like to propose a standardized API on which we can agree for the future:
   MemberDataTool:
     searchForMembers(mapping, maybe_some_options=None, **kw)
It would search on all the keys of mapping+kw.
The options would be there to ask for a substring or exact match. To be 
decided later.
I'd like it to return a list of users, but this may be problematic from 
a security point of view. What do you think? Otherwise we could make it 
take an attributes=('email', 'fullname') args, and return a dict with at 
least the specified attributes.


A side problem is that this method will have to have knowledge of how to 
do a search in the user folder. And there are lots of those, with 
nowhere an standardized API in sight to do search either :-( (actually I 
don't know any that can do a search appart from LDAPUserFolder). Maybe 
we could take the oportunity to define one ? Searching for userids, 
roles, groups (for me), is a prerequisite for me.


In any case I'm going to do what I outline above because I need it for 
CPS. It would be nice if would could standardize the APIs and do a 
minimal implementation in CMF Core/Default.


Thanks for your comments,
(please direct them to zope-cmf at zope.org)

Florent

-- 
Florent Guillaume, Nuxeo (Paris, France)
+33 1 40 33 79 87  http://nuxeo.com  mailto:fg at nuxeo.com