[Zope] Q: How to serve Files/Dirs as documents?

[Thomas Riedl]

Hi there!

After some interruption to my Zoperies (live's no mercy, right? ;-) I'm
wondering about this:

I'd like (for IMHO quite obvious reasons ;-) to have some mapping from
my (Unix) filesystem to Zope objects, like I have directories with
(DTML) files which I's like to 'render'.

I'm thinking of quite regularly changing file content (due to events
external to zope) along with a good deal of 'binaries' whose "meta
informations" (version, author, notify-upon-change a.s.o.) are stored in
the DTML files. It's also possible that vi-nics want to meddle with them
(so,
no Emacs EFS support for those boneheads).

(
 E.g. an User uses his browser to navigate himself to a some
'documentation
 area'. He then could see for all docs residing there their author,
current
  version, last update time, approval by and all that. By clicking on a
 'Document Data' button, his browser would e.g. start some 'version
control'
 wrapper along with StarOffice. If there are changes, this very wrapper
 would rewrite the appropriate '*.dtml' file.
)

A "Magic Black Box" Zope thing would then e.g. try to match an object
path
to directories, read something like '.properties'-files for each
directory to represent folder properties and e.g.
'.properties.file.dtml' for each 
leave object 'file.dtml' and of course use acquisition.

(
 Such a path might e.g. read '/Zope/Filemap1/home/thatsme/currvitae' and
 hit a 'currvitae'-File that contains something like 'This is <!--var
me-->'
 and e.g. 'thatsme/.properties' containig a line 'me=My Real Name'

 Filemap1 according to my current idea would be a Product instantiation
 of my/some TBD "Magic Black Box FileAccess" product.
).

Q's now are:
Does this Make Sense?

Is there something that could keep me from reinventing a wheel?

Why wouldn't I like to do it this way? And which way is the Zen Way to
go?


TIA

Tom Riedl

-- 
MfG: Thomas Riedl
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