[Zope-dev] Using LoginManager with users stored in several Specialists

[Itai Tavor]

Hi,

I have two different types of users - Customers and Resellers. Each 
one is stored in a separate ZClass and managed by a separate 
Specialist. I need to be able to authenticate users from both user 
lists, as well as a third group for people working locally on the 
site - Managers, Customer Service, etc.

So I thought I could store a 'LoginProperties' propertysheet in each 
of the two ZClasses, and use a separate UserSource to access each 
one. The local users will be handled by a PersistentUserSource.

My questions are:

- Is this a good idea? It seems better to me than storing all users 
in a PersistentUSerSource (from the Membership product) and mapping 
from it to the Customer and Reseller classes. Each type of user is 
created and managed in different ways so it won't make sense to 
manage all users from one place.

- I'm not sure how to customize a UserSource to access the 
propertysheets on the Customer and Reseller classes. The easiest way 
seems to be to define userExists, userRoles and userAuthenticate 
methods in a GenericUserSource, but I don't think it's a good idea - 
I still wouldn't know how to make changes to the propertysheet from 
the LoginManager (for example, changePassword should be a method of 
acl_users, not of the user classes, because it does the same thing 
for all user types), and there is no caching. Should I write my own 
UserSource? Or can I do it with Data Plug-ins? I'd like to keep the 
solution simple, but I do want it to be efficient (fast and cached).

TIA,

Itai
-- 
Itai Tavor                    "Je sautille, donc je suis."
C3Works    itai@c3works.com              - Kermit the Frog

"If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything"