[Zope] ANNOUNCE: TinyTables Beta 2

[Ty Sarna]

I've uploaded a new beta of TinyTables to the Contrib section of
zope.org. 

The main change in this version is a brand new interface for editing the
data.  The pick-your-delimiter fields are now replaced with a more
flexible CSV-like syntax.  The old system had several problems:
first, it would have caused problems later on with a read-write
tinytables.  If your delimiter is ':' and someone cases an "add row"
method to be invoked with a column containing a ':', you've got
problems.  Next time you edit the data through the management interface,
you'll most likely mess up that row by accident when the ':' in the data
is taken as a delmiter.

Another problem was that people tended to do things like set the
delimiter to ',' and enter a row like 'hello, there, world'. Either
the second and later fields get an extra trailing space, or
TinyTables has to strip columns of leading and trailing whitespace,
meaning you can't have any if you really want it. With the new system,
no problem. Strings can now include any characters, including newlines and
nulls. See the TinyTable section in the Zope Help Interface for
more information on the new input format.

Other changes:
	- Columns can now be NULL (missing). Just as with SQL, sometimes
	  it's important to distinguish between empty value and no value,
	  or even more importantly for numeric fields, betweem 0 and no
	  value. 

	- "date" column type renamed to "datetime". New "date" type
	  added that forces DateTime values to be date-only.
	  (essentially does x = DateTime(x.Date())

	- version.txt and README.txt added


Note: I uploaded a version of this to the zope site last night.  If you
haoppened to be poking around and found it before this announcement, you
might have downloaded a buggy version.  Please make sure the version you
get is 0-8-2. (Of course, 0-8-2 may also be buggy, but at least I don't
*know* of any bugs :^)