[Zope-CMF] catalog tool

[computing project]

Hi,

I'm trying to package up some tools I've written, and I've come across one 
bit that is proving tricky with CMF.  I will try and explain.

My tool allows users to rate content in a site, and stores information about 
their responses in a list.  So ratings can apply to any content at all, the 
tool decorates the object with the data about the responses, and deals with 
that side of things.  However, I want to be able to make this work with the 
catalog, so I can store some information about the last rating, when it was, 
the average etc and search against it.

I could use more attributes to store these calculations whenever a new 
rating is added, but I was thinking of following the same approach as for 
workflow variables - my tool provides some catalog variables that are fed 
into the indexing wrapper.  Also I can add new calculations much more easily 
this way.

To avoid creating my own catalog tool tied to my new tool, I was toying with 
the idea of extending the catalog tool so it had a list of tools that could 
provide catalog variables.  Similar (well okay virtually identical) to the 
way the actions tool has a list of action providers that it consults.  Is 
this something that would be useful as a patch for the CMF?  It seemed to me 
that having the catalog tool know about the workflow tool at a code level is 
not quite right anyhow.

Any opinions?

--paul t

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