[Zope-dev] New beta GenericUserFolder

[Ross Boylan]

Thanks for a very useful and generous response.  I do have a few more
questions/comments...

At 05:08 PM 11/23/99 +1100, Stuart 'Zen' Bishop wrote:
>On Mon, 22 Nov 1999, Ross Boylan wrote:
>
>> I notice that a lot of products redefine class variables (e.g.,
>> GenericUserFolder has
>>     isPrincipiaFolderish=1
>>     isAUserFolder=1
>> ) which are already in the superclass.  Is this because:
>> 	* it's more readable
>
>Because it is more readable, and ensures that nothing wierd goes on
>with multiple inheritance. For example, in GenericUserFolder,
>I inherit from both Folder and BasicUserFolder. Now, since only
BasicUserFolder
>defined isAUserFolder, then I could have left it out and things would
>work happily. However, if in a future revision, someone moved isAUserFolder
>to SimpleItem or other subclass of Folder and defined it as false, my
>product would break. I used to like multiple inheritance until I saw
>a real product using it (Zope), and now I appreciate Java more :-)
>
I have a smalltalk background, so single inheritance always seemed fine to
me.  I think strong typing makes it much more essential than otherwise
(I've done quite a bit of C++ too), and of course Python is not strongly
typed).

 >> 1) Let new users define themselves on a new user screen (not a Zope
>> management console).
>> I've been hung up on the architectural points of where such a screen
should
>> go, how it is to refer to the acl_users folder, and how to set
permissions.
>
>You need a form, accessible to the Anonymous role, that will let a
>user setup an account. You also need a DTML method to act as the
>action of this form. This DTML method would insert the releveant data
>into a TinyTable,SQL table, whatever. It would probably need a proxy
>role defined so that the method has rights to add the data (since the
>anonymous user shouldn't have rights). You could then use GenericUserFolder
>to authenticate users from this TinyTable,SQL table,whatever.
>
How does one setup a proxy role?

I was thinking of a much different approach, namely that I would create an
OrgUser (my subclass of User) on the spot, and shove it into the acl_users.
 I understood that python, rather than dtml, was the way to go for that.
So I thought it would look like this:
form dispatches to python method
(and I wasn't sure how to get the form and python namespaces together)
python method creates OrgUser and puts it in acl_users
(rasing both a namespace and permissioning issue)
using existing methods where possible.

I recall reading that permissions only inhibit the ORB and dtml, but not
python.  Is that accurate?