[Zope] brain'ed dtml???

[Kent Polk]

This was from a couple of weeks ago:

> We've kicked around the idea of an ExternalFile object, and I
> started a small project that fizzed out.  My question was where to
> draw the line, do we make it a simple pipe to one file, or a Folderoid
> object that 'mounts' a part of a filesystem into Zope?  The first
> would be pretty simple, the second would be pretty hard, IMO.

I wasn't ready to answer this the first time around. :^)

What I am trying to do right now is to map URL entries built
from a database query which builds an index table and include
content located in the filesystem.

Constraints are that the document URL appear to be a static
URL (no GET query) and that I provide a unique DMTL wrapper
for each folder which allows one to customize the wrapper
that contains the filesystem-based data. Actually, I would
like to obtain the included data from anywhere I need, not
just from the filesystem.

Now I know how to use pluggable brains from ZSQL to specify
a class to get close to this, but what if the document isn't
in the database and a query can't return it?  I would like to
have that same class behavior which would allow me to use
a __getitem__ to use the 'filename' (which doesn't really
exist anywhere) as info on how to include the content I need.

I wrote a little external method - include_file() which takes
the pathname from a folder attribute and the 'filename' which
is called via a 'wrap' dtml method (wrap?filename) which
includes the filedata in context.

But instead of 'wrap/?filename' what I want is more like
'get/wrap/filename' where get sets the class behavior that
knows how to find 'filename' and 'wrap' is the editable
dtml in that folder which encapsulates it.  Or I'd be very
happy with 'wrap/filename', but I don't know how to assign
__getitem__ behavior to a DTML document. :^)

Alternately, I was thinking of writing a Product which allowed
me to specify the dtml wrapper as an attribute and used a
__getitem__ method to retrieve the filedata and encapsulate
it in the wrapper.

Suggestions?

Thanks
Kent