[Zope] - Passing around state information

[Konrad Hinsen]

I am working on a small project based on ZPublisher (and I don't even
want to think about how much work it would be without it!). One problem
I have come across is how to provide some kind of "state information" or
"pervasive user option".

Almost all pages on my site have content that can be presented in
various formats; essentially this is a user option. But it would be
tedious for the users to specify this option over and over again.
Ideally, they would make their choice once (on the starting page)
and then forget about it. But somehow the information has to be
passed on to the rest of my site.

One solution would be cookies, but I'd like to avoid them for two
reasons: many users disable cookies in their browsers, and I don't
know how to use cookies with Zope.

Another solution would be to attach the option to each and every
URL and always pass it around. But I can't see how to do that
with forms; I'd have to persuade the form to return a value
that it has received itself via its URL, but which is neither
displayed nor entered by the user.

Any ideas?

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Konrad Hinsen                            | E-Mail: hinsen@cnrs-orleans.fr
Centre de Biophysique Moleculaire (CNRS) | Tel.: +33-2.38.25.55.69
Rue Charles Sadron                       | Fax:  +33-2.38.63.15.17
45071 Orleans Cedex 2                    | Deutsch/Esperanto/English/
France                                   | Nederlands/Francais
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------