[Zope-dev] robustness in management interface.

[Romain Slootmaekers]

Jim Washington wrote:
> Romain Slootmaekers wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> The zope management interface has some robustness problems:
>>
>> whenever you call manage_workspace (the normal way of managing a 
>> folder through the HTML Zope management interface) on a folder X, and 
>> some object y in that folder gives an error (fi, it has no title 
>> attribute, ) the whole folder becomes unmanageble. The only thing you 
>> can do at that point is to manually delete the problematic object by 
>> typing:
>>
>> http://..../X/manage_delObjects?ids=y
>>
>> It seems to me that an object in a folder should not interfere with 
>> the management of the folder (at least, you should be able to throw 
>> the object out of the folder)
>>
>>
>> probably, a try/except or <dtml-try> in the right place fix this.
> 
> 
> 
> Or, you could assure that your objects all have titles (at least ="") if 
> you want them managed through the ZMI.  I have not seen this as a 
> *requirement*, but every example of a zope object I have seen uses 
> self.title=aString in __init__(). 
> It is also important to have titles for most cataloging.  Do you catalog 
> your site?  Is not title a good thing for searching?  Might you catalog 
> in the future?
> 
maybe I didn't express myself as clearly as I could have:
the title attribute was an example (fi=for instance) of what can go wrong.

> Perhaps something for a BestPractices document(?) or wiki(?):
> 
> "ZMI-manageable objects have a title attribute.  This is a string."
> 
> For a bit of context on the above, I put together a product that has 
> title as a function (=[:30] of some content) some time ago.  I have been 
> led to understand that this was a bad idea because it breaks some 
> cataloging.
> 
yep.your catalog can be inconsistent, unless the changing of the 
attribute will call a recatalog orso.

> Your idea of <dtml-try> does have merit IMHO.  Should the ZMI really 
> assume existence of anything other than "id" for objects?
> 

Sloot.