[Zope] - xml marshaling experiment

[Amos Latteier]

With all this talk of xml-rpc integration into ZPublisher, I just had a
small idea. Why not add simple xml marshalling as a Zope input marshalling
format. As an experiment I chose Andrew K's xml.marshal, though of course,
we could add any or all the other xml marshalling formats as well.

Here's the patch for ZPublisher/Converters.py:

*** Converters.py      Sat Jan 23 13:29:38 1999
--- Converters.py       Sat Jan 23 13:19:58 1999
***************
*** 159,164 ****
--- 159,168 ----
      if type(v) is not ListType: v=(v,)
      return tuple(v)

+ def field2xmlmarshal(v):
+     import xml.marshal
+     return xml.marshal.loads(v)
+
  type_converters = {
      'float':    field2float,
      'int':      field2int,
***************
*** 171,175 ****
--- 175,180 ----
      'tokens':   field2tokens,
      'lines':    field2lines,
      'text':     field2text,
+     'xmlmarshal': field2xmlmarshal,
      }

The only thing that's required is to add the xml sig's xml package to some
place Zope can get at, like lib/python1.5 (hopefully the xml package will
be in Zope by default in the next release) and of course get the
xml-marshal module (which I believe was posted to the xml sig a while ago.)

Voila--now you can enter xml into form elements and have Zope parse it,
simply by naming your form elements with the 'xmlmarshal' type converter,
for example, 'myInput:xmlmarshal'. Here's a Document that allows you to
experiment:

<h1>XML Marshal Demo</h1>
<form action="<!--var id-->" method="post">
<textarea name="spam:xmlmarshal" cols="60" rows="5">
</textarea><br>
<input type="submit">
</form>
<!--#if spam-->
spam=<!--#var spam-->
<!--#/if-->

This document calls itself and displays the marshalled contents of the
textarea. So if you type this into the textarea:

<marshal><tuple><integer>12</integer><string>sdsdf</string></tuple></marshal>

You'll see this:

spam=(12, 'sdsdf')

So, I guess you probably won't be entering a lot of this stuff by hand ;-)
But maybe it would be a nice format for cookies, or Zope properties, or for
programs that call Zope methods (oh, I guess that's what xml-rpc is for...)
etc.

-Amos