[Zope-dev] Storing part of an object on the file system

[Andy McKay]

Ok whack idea #34... Well sort of, the idea was sparked by ExtFile (yes its
all his fault honest). We want to have files on the file system for many
reasons which I won't go into now, just take it for granted. But we also
want some of the objects information to be in the standard data.fs, so we
can catalog it use acquisition provide a simple interface to it and so on.
So far you are saying thats ExtFile and you are right.

But we want to extend it to any object anywhere, instead of storing the data
attribute in the object and pickling it in the ZODB I want to be able to
store the data attribute on the file system. This gives us loads of
advantages we also thought this would be extremely useful to other people.
We've bounced around ideas on how to do this and here the only two so far:

-    we could overload the data attribute with a class that on Pickling into
the ZODB instead writes it on to the filesystem...
-    we could in the ZODB put a hack to say if pickling something with so
and so attribute do this instead...

I feel like this something I should just not be doing, but it would be great
if I could get it work...

--
  Andy McKay.