[Zope-CMF] Question about DCWorkflow Patches & _executeTransition

[Evan Henshaw]

I'm new to the Zope community so please forgive me if i'm asking this 
in the wrong place. I'm trying to figure out how best to contribute 
back to the community.

I've been using DCWorkflow for a little while. Today i ran in to a 
problem. I was trying to use a workflow variable to store a list. But 
addVariable expects text. I could have wrote something to create a 
string which was comma separated and then extracts it when needed, but 
that feels like a hack.

So i was looking at writing an script to set / update the more complex 
variable on the object instead of using the workflow variable. This 
also feels like a hack. I don't want to run another script, i want to 
call a method on my object to allow for tracking more complex state 
variables.

It feels to me like it's bad style to create a script just to call one 
function in my object, but that would work.

A better solution would be to update DCWorkflow one of two ways.

First we could change the way workflow variables worked so they aren't 
expected to just be strings, but could allow for dict's, lists, and 
other more complex objects than just strings. This wouldn't be too 
hard, but i believe it might break existing code, which is bad style.

Another solution would be to add two new attributes to transitions. A 
before_method and after_method. These would be like before_script_name 
and after_script_name in that they would be called to allow specific 
functionality to be added to the transition.

Looking at _executeTransition it shouldn't be very hard to add this 
functionality. I think _executeTransition should probably be refactored 
anyway because it's quite long.

The only disadvantage of this addition is if it somehow violates the 
model employed within DCWorkflow. I'm not sure if workflows are 
supposed to be treating the objects they are moving around as more or 
less black boxes or not.

What i want to know, is do people think this is a good idea? How do i 
go about submitting a patch to DCWorkflow? Beyond that, what is the 
process for contributing code to a CMF in the 'collective'?

Thanks,
evan