[Zope-CMF] Re: CMFActionIcons improvement and Help system

[Tres Seaver]

Vincenzo Di Somma wrote:

> I'm wondering why ActionIcon doesn't have an attribute releated to the
> action provider, it will be useful because the action id is unique only
> in a single action provider so you may have the same icon for different
> actions.

The CMFActionIcons tool tries to organized "equivalent" actions based on 
category:  if two providers (e.g., Document and File TypeInformation in 
the portal_types tool) both supply an action whose category is 'object' 
and whose id is 'edit', the tool assigns them both the same icon.  This 
is by design:  keeping the same icons for actions which are logically 
"alike" gives the user more ability to grasp their meaning.

If two unrelated providers each supply actions whose IDs and categories 
clash, but which shouldn't be treated as equivalent by the tool, then 
the tool expects the site manager to rename either the ID or the 
category for one of the actions.

> I want also point the attention to the possibility of have a general
> help system in CMF where we can associate an help document to the actions.
> It is conceptually the same thing of associate an icon to an action so
> we can duplicate the CMFActionIcons tool and create a CMFActionHelps or
> we can add a new field that refer to the help doc and change the name of
> CMFActionIcons in something like CMFActionPreferences or something like
> that.

I could imagine extending the tool to support such extra metadata about 
actions (we thought had a use for per-action javascript snippets at one 
point).  Dieter Maurer is supplying an slternative patch, which would 
allow decorating actions on individual providers with arbitrary extra 
metadata.

Tres.
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Tres Seaver                                tseaver at zope.com
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