[Zope] Generating non-existent documents on the fly?

[Doug Hellmann]

Stefan Hoffmeister wrote:
> 
> Is there a way to generate non-existent documents on the fly - some kind
> of "rewriting" the target URL?
> 
> Example site structure
> 
>   /root (http://localhost/)
>      /content
>         layout_template
>         some_txt
> 
> A user queries
> 
>   http://localhost/content/some.html
> 
> Obviously, "some.html" does not exist. This is where some mechanism (the
> one I am trying to find <g>) kicks in. It will analyze the query string,
> detect that there is "some_txt" and "layout_template". Based on that it
> will generate "some.html" on the fly.
> 
> Any ideas?

The obvious answer here is to rename 'layout_template' to 'some.html'. 
That only gets you one dynamic page, though, and I take it from your
question that if the user tries to access
http://localhost/content/somethingelse.html and there is a
somethingelse_txt, the template should fill that in too.

If you want to write Python code, you could subclass a Folder and use
the __bobo_traverse__ method to create the object to return.  I've had
good luck with this and fetching content (fully qualified HTML) out of a
database backend.  It's a little messy though.

I'm not sure if you can get to the traversal code through a ZClass.  I
haven't played with them much yet.

Doug
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Doug Hellmann                  Greenberg News Networks, Inc.
Software Engineer              (Soon to be WebMD)
dhellmann@gnncast.net          http://www.medcast.com /
http://www.webmd.com