[Zope-CMF] Question about DCWorkflow Patches & _executeTransition

[Kapil Thangavelu]

On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 08:00, Evan Henshaw wrote:
> 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.
> 

variables in dcworkflow are expressed as tales expressions, and are
capable of returning lists. the default value does seem to be restricted
to a string.


> 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.
> 

cmfcore/dcworkflow also has an option for a workflowmethod, which is a
method on the object whose invocation triggers a state change.


> 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.

dcworkflow already supports before and after transition scripts, if you
haven't already done so i'd recommend reading the docs here

http://cvs.zope.org/CMF/DCWorkflow/help/


> 
> 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'?

re contributions, adding it to the collector is probably best
http://collector.zope.org/Collectors/CMF

hope that helps,

-kapil