[Zope-CMF] Re: Method Aliases

[Tres Seaver]

On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 14:46, Kapil Thangavelu wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 30, 2003, at 01:39  AM, Yuppie wrote:
> 
> > Hi!
> >
> >
> > Kapil Thangavelu wrote:
> >
> >> i've been away from cmf dev for several months so maybe i'm a bit 
> >> behind the times, but why is this even in CMF? is it adding features 
> >> for the sake of adding features? are users really typing in urls, is 
> >> it that much trouble to query a ti for action urls or abstracting 
> >> that? is there a proposal for this anywhere? i say this because it 
> >> breaks several things i've worked on, static deployment and 
> >> subversion/fs integration ( the latter being a place where traversal 
> >> hooks are actually needed) and i dont see the rational.
> >
> > This is the proposal:
> > <http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2003-June/018836.html>
> > See the related thread for dicussion.
> >
> > Please let me know if you have further questions.
> 
> looking over the thread i still don't see the problem that this is 
> trying to solve.. at least the logic given seems circular.
> 
> from the original proposal email
> 
> > 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.
> 
> why is getting rid of these urls a good thing? what use cases does it 
> solve?
> 
> > 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.
> 
> ok, so in this  one particular case of 'view', where basically a method 
> is defined on content objects that will return the default view, the 
> logic seems to be that this is bad because the method name can't be 
> used in the definition of an action with a target of view? that logic 
> seems circular to me, and an incredibly minor issue besides. i mean its 
> not like overriding 'view' behavior isn't a matter
> of setting a property within the preexisting infrastructure anyways.
> 
> the only justification i'm seeing for this feature is that pretty urls 
> are good for being pretty, or features for features sake. if i'm 
> missing something please enlighten me.

"Pretty" isn't the issue;  "meaningful" is.  Many clients, for instance,
expect filename extensions, but Python methods can't have them. 
Likewise, aliases allow localization of the otherwised Anglo-centric
method names.  Users *do* look at URLs, often before clicking through to
links, in order to get clues about what to expect on the other side. 
The current name-mangling is an undesirable artifact of using
acquisition to find software;  aliases put back "natural" names for
methods.

Tres.
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Tres Seaver                                tseaver at zope.com
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