[Zope] Various questions (long).

[Otto Hammersmith]

I posted this Friday, but it seems to have gotten lost in 
the ether.  Appologies if it shows up twice (checked the 
archives and it's not there so...).

Hello all,

FWIW, I've copied the UserDB product (1.3.0) from the old 
Zope.org site and created a package. It's cataloged now, 
but the URL is http://www.zope.org/Members/otto/userdb.

I've downloaded the beta ZDiscussions product (very nice, 
BTW) and it has brought up a question about ZCatalog and 
classes that inherit from it. If an object inherits from 
ZCatalog does that mean it's sub-objects are only cataloged 
there? For example, if I create a ZDiscussion topic
how can I have a site wide search interface that will also 
search the ZDiscussion items in that topic.

I've done some experimenting and I've found out I can have 
a ZCatalog catalog the discussion itself, which is somewhat 
useful... but there doesn't seem to be a way to catalog the 
items outside the discussion. 

Wouldn't it make more sense for ZDiscussion to not inherit 
from ZCatalog but allow provide a search interface limited 
to searching discussion?  It should be easy to limit the 
search based on meta-type, but I don't see a way to limit 
it to a single discussion. Also, to allow the possibility 
of keeping the discussion out of the default catalog it
should be possible to create a new catalog as a sub-object 
of the ZDiscussion.

On the other hand would it make sense (or is is possible 
already) to "chain" ZCatalogs?

Just a few thoughts... :)

My second question is on AUTHENTICATED_USER. What 
properties does it have? The DTML User's Guide says "This 
object currently provides no public attributes" but the 
source for ZDiscussions clearly uses some functions and 
attributes like getName() and 'email'.  Is this something
that UserDB gives you? (I haven't had the chance to play 
around with that much, yet.)

TIA.

                    -Otto.

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