[Zope] ZopeBook ZCatalog Question

[Dieter Maurer]

Chris Gray writes:
 > Zope Book - Chapter 9 - 2nd sentence:
 > 
 > "You can also use it to search external data such as relational data,
 > files, and remote web pages."
 > 
 > Can anyone point me to further information on how to do these things?
ZCatalog uses the method "objectItems" to find the children
of an object in the ZCatalog method "Find Objects to Catalog".

Thus, to extend cataloguing into a database, you will need
an object the "objectItems" of which will return the database
records you want to be cataloged.

You can not use raw database records, as the catalog requires
each catalogued object to be URL addressable (it uses the
URL to identify the object). Thus, you must use
a pluggable brain (--> Advanced tab of Z SQL methods management
interface) to provide the "absolute_url" method (or whatever
ZCatalog will tell you, it does not find during the cataloguing).

As you probably will be interested, that the object can be retrieved
with the URL, you will also need to learn about "direct traversal".
This is make database records URL addressable.

As you may see, it is not trivial.


Dieter