[Zope] better than Notes (but where are the views ?)

[chas]

thanks Rob and Kevin, 

having a ball and lots of success mixing zcatalog with zclasses... 


Kevin Dangoor wrote :
>>however, i'm missing sommething. i can create these documents (oops,
>>i mean zclass instances)  but  how do i get them out of the object db
>>again ? is it possible to create the equivalent of Notes 'views' ?
>>ie. filter all the instances of a class and/or with certain values
>>of given properties ?
>
>This is what ZCatalog comes in. It makes it really easy to grab objects from
>all over the ZODB and spit them out any way you want.
>
><dtml-in "Catalog({'meta_type': 'Article', 'author': 'Blah'})">
><dtml-if sequence-start>
><ul>
></dtml-if>
><li><dtml-var title></li>
><dtml-if sequence-end>
></ul>
></dtml-if>
></dtml-in>
>
>This is how the new zope.org beta works. A user can create a news item in
>their own Member folder and, after approval, this article will bubble up to
>the main news listing via ZCatalog.

---------------------------------------------

Rob Page wrote :
>> eg. just say i had a zclass called "articles" and each article has
>> an "author" and a "date". i then create 100 instances of this zclass.
>> how could i display all the articles written by a given author or
>> on a certain date ?
>
>You could either:
>
>(a) tool through all of them searching for the values you were after
>(yuck), or
>(b) use the ZCatalog stuff
>
>ZCatalog is a full-text and fielded indexing engine for Zope.  The New
>Zope Site uses ZClasses and the ZCatalog EXTENSIVELY.
>
>IMO, ZClass instances + ZCatalog are analagous to Notes views.

even more powerful, now that i've played with them - a little more
work in the short term, but paying off handsomely already. just need
to free up time/bandwidth to try mixing this with the Python notes
classes and things'll get really interesting ;-)

cheers,

chas

ps. even had a lotus consultant (anonymity requested) write "looks like 
    domino done right"  :-)