[Zope] trees, hypernews and frames

[Andy Heath]

Sorry, this is involved and takes a lot of words to explain.

I'm building a zope site which also serves HyperNews
discussions.  Apache and Zserver are working well together.

What I have is a tree widget iterating over a folder,
some of whose elements are treated as hyperlinks to hypernews
discussions.  Base articles for discussions are in the
contents of the zope items so .... when  you click
on an element in the tree it follows a link to hypernews
and the hypernews fetches the contents of the "same
item" you just clicked on.  This is a roundabout
way but the only way I know to keep my hypernews headers
and stuff in zope It does all work well but....

My first implementation had a two column table with
the tree on the left and the particular discussion on the
right.  This worked well logically but wasn't too visually
appealing because as you expanded/collapsed tree branches
everything moved around on the page.  So I re-organised
it to use frames - a header frame, then two columns
(tree in one, discussion in the other) and a footer
and this works very well.

My problem is now this - except for the top one
the frames on the page do not include 
what in the former implementation was the header (i.e.
the fancy bit at the top that gives context and doesn't move).
Now its possible and common to access the hypernews discussions
without coming in through the zope home page with the tree
widget.  It is common to do so because when hypernews sends
email it puts a hyperlink to the item in the email which
does just that.  When this hyperlink is followed the page is
fetched from zope but of course the fancy header isn't there.
Since its no longer displayed inside the frameset the
header needs to be displayed as well but isn't.

That's the crunch.  How to get the fancy header served
when its displayed outside the frameset but not served
when its inside.  If it were all in zope then this could
be done by passing a variable value so the page could
know how it was called but hypernews does not pass on
anything like this when it fetches content from other
servers.

Anyone think of a way round this?

Please copy replies to
a.k.heath@open.ac.uk
as I take the digest.

Andy
-- 
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Andy Heath                    a.k.heath@open.ac.uk
The Open University           +44 (0) 114 2885738