[Zope] - help with doing PUT . . .

[Amos Latteier]

At 12:26 PM 1/25/99 -0600, David Wagle wrote:
>HOW do I code up a page in Zope that will allow the 
>user to use the PUT protocol to upload their own web-page?

You don't need to write support for PUT, Zope already has support for PUT,
built-in.

>basically I am trying to allow users to create documents, then
>add meta-data about those documents to a database, and upload
>the document to hte server.

I'm not totally sure that I understand what you want, but it sounds like this:
Have user fill out a form. The form contains a number of fields including a
file upload. Some of the form data is used as the content for a new document.

>I have a method that aquires the meta-data and creates the 
>folder for the document. However, i don't have an easy way
>to allow the users to simply provide the file name to upload
>using a PUT.

If you've already collected the Document content with a file upload, there
is no need to use PUT.

Here's an example of how to create a Document given a file upload.

Basically you need two documents. One to collect the data, 'doc_form', and
one to actually create the Document, 'create_doc'.

doc_form:

<!--#var standard_html_header-->
<form action="create_doc" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
id: <input type="text" name="doc_id"--><br>
title: <input type="text" name="doc_title"><br>
file: <input type="file" name="doc_body:string"><br>
<input type="submit">
</form>
<!--#var standard_html_footer-->

create_doc:

<!--#var standard_html_header-->
<!--#call expr="manage_addDocument(doc_id,doc_title,doc_body)"-->
<h1>Document Added</h1>
<p>Document <!--#var doc_id--> added.</p>
<!--#var standard_html_footer-->

So what's going on here?

The first document consists of a form, including a file upload input.
Notice that the encoding type is set to "multipart/form-data" this is
necessary to use file uploading. Notice also that the action of this form
is 'create_doc'. That means the submitted form will be processed by
'create_doc'. Finally notice that the name of the file upload input is
'doc_body:string' this tells ZPublisher to marshal the file upload into a
big string.

The second Document just makes one call to the Zope API to create the
Document. Then it returns some confirmation HTML. The call that does the
work is 'manage_addDocument'. How did I figure out the arguments to this
method? Simple, I used the on-line object reference which is available
under the Help tab on management screens.

Of course, you don't have to process your form with DTML. The form could be
processed by an external method, for example. In that case the method would
look something like this:

def create_doc(self,doc_id,doc_title,doc_body):
    "create a document"
    # perhaps do some processing here
    self.manage_addDocument(doc_id,doc_title,doc_body)
    return "Some confirmation message"

Hope this helps.

-Amos

P.S. PUT is something completely different.