[Zope] manage_changeProperties doesn't for my zclass

[Thayer Gignoux]

Hi,

I'm another newbie with a dumbass question. I've got a folder, listitems,
which only contains objects of type mailitem. I'm cloning an instance of
mailitem which lives outside the folder into it

<dtml-with listitems>
<dtml-with "manage_clone(mailitem,REQUEST['email'],REQUEST)">

So far so good. The new mailitem is created with email as the id. Then I
want to set two more properties from REQUEST variables.


  <dtml-call "manage_changeProperties({
     firstname : REQUEST['firstname'],
     lastname  : REQUEST['lastname']
     })">

</dtml-with>

</dtml-with>

But even though it (presumably) executes without errors it just never works.
I know I'm missing something really basic here. Any help would be
appreciated. And yes I realize this is not a terribly good real-world
solution but I'm trying to bring myself up to zope speed with a simple
mailing list service.

One other thing: It seems to me that the general case of populating an
arbitrary number of object properties with REQUEST values could be served by
a method which iterates over an object's properties to obtain their names
and then gets their values from the REQUEST namespace, assuming that the
property and the form variable names are exactly the same. I don't quite
understand how to do that yet but if anyone cares to create some dtml to do
that I am at the point where it would be really helpful.  TIA

Thayer