[Zope] Creating a New Object Type - Use ZClass or Python?

eric jones ej@ee.duke.edu
Fri, 30 Jul 1999 05:30:19 -0400


Hello,

Forgive me if this is a double post - I sent it to zope@egroups.com , and it
never appeared in the posts as far as I could tell.

I'm pretty comfortable with Python, but new to Zope.  We're trying to figure
out the best way to set up an academic web site that has a list of
publications on it.  Each publication has several authors, a description,
etc.  It will also have a pdf and perhaps a postcript copy of the article.
We need to be able to search the author list.  I'd like to create a PubClass
that, when it displays itself looks like:

"Some silly paper" IEEE Trans. on Antennas and Propagation
    Description: Some rubbish about how great the silly paper is.
    Authors: Eric Jones, Larry Carin, William Joines
    PDF: link_to_pdf_file_object (size)
    PS: link_to_ps_file_object (size)

I'd like the Add form to have places for adding all the basic properties.
The paper title, journal name, and description are pretty straight forward I
think.  The authors are a little more troubling.  I'd like to make them a
list of tuples:

[ (first_name,last_name), (first_name,last_name),...]

to facilitate searching for a particular author (so that only Larry Carin's
papers are displayed on his page).   Is there a way to do this sort of thing
with ZClasses?  Also, I want the Add form to have places to browse for the
pdf and ps files - much like a Zope File object - and then add these files
to the PubClass object.

Is this best done by creating a class in python or with the ZClass
interface?

thanks,
eric