[Zope-dev] Adding your own (complex) data types to property p ages: example a nd problems...nd problems...

[Jason Spisak]

Philip:

> Ty and I were planning to solve this problem in ZPatterns at some point,
> but taking a somewhat different approach.  Our idea was to address the
> issue through the RIPP model PropertyHandlers.  PropertyHandlers are like
> methods that have methods - so if an object had a date value called
> StartDate, you could do something like object.StartDate.HTMLeditor() to get
> an HTML snippet for editing that property, object.StartDate() to get the
> actual property value, and object.StartDate.set(data) to change the
> property.  This makes the system wildly extensible, while keeping the
> ZPublisher type marshalling clean. 

I agree totally.
 (One problem with adding new types to
> the registry is that it's not very isolatable for virtual hostingish
> applications' security.)  It's up to the PropertyHandler to determine how
> the data is marshalled to/from standard ZPublisher-supported types.
> 
> The other advantage to this approach is that it scales to properties which
> are actually relationships to other objects - for example, mapping a
> customer number property to establish a relationship with a customer
> object.  Relationship PropertyHandlers actually delegate their
> display/editor rendering and input marshalling to the Specialist
> responsible for the kind of object the relationship "points to".
> 
> None of this exists in code yet; just thought I'd bring it up as an
> alternative approach. 

I was about to write some of that, and then turned around and did a
"mapping" to html display and edit "widgets" in DTML because that's what I
know.


Jason Spisak
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