[Zope] organizational questions

Scott Lewis csl@balticave.com
Wed, 21 Apr 1999 08:37:35 -0600


hi folks,

first off, thanks to the people who offered quick, helpful responses 
to my question yesterday.

ok, i'm converted. i've started implementing in zope. i have a 
relational database of about 8 tables. it is used for a registry of 
trainings and trainers. we have ten centers that will offer trainings. 
each center needs a publicly accessible home page where people 
can search on data in the database. also, each center needs a 
management section, where they can insert/edit/delete data and 
more. this section is restricted to certain validated users.

my question is how to structure this in zope. i started by creating a 
centers folder, and a subfolder for each center. i plan to place 
common DTML docs and SQL methods in the centers folder, 
letting each center acquire them. each center has an ID property, 
corresponding to its unique ID in the database. i just noticed this 
morning that this is the same way its done in the budget sample 
application in the HOWTO section. i must be going in the right 
direction.

i expect to have a number of DTML documents that are access 
restricted. for organizational clarity and ease of managing the 
permissions, i'd like to put them in a folder. but if i put them in a 
folder in the centers folder, then they are parallel to the individual 
centers and can't be acquired. does this mean i'm stuck putting 
them all in the centers folder? any suggestions?

lets say i put a DTML document called dtViewTrainings in the 
centers directory. it uses a SQL method and an ID property to get 
trainings from the database. so the user views 
http://.../centers/roswell/dtViewTrainings and the ID is acquired 
from the roswell folder. everything's ok. but what if they browse to 
http://..centers/dtViewTrainings. there's an error because ID is not 
defined. that's fine, because the request makes no sense. but is 
this problem? it just kind of bugs me that the user could browse to 
this URL and get a meaningless error.

thanks in advance for any help,

-scott

-----
Scott Lewis
Baltic Avenue Productions
csl@balticave.com