Missing API Documentation? was: [Zope] manage_clone and proxy roles

[J. Cameron Cooper]

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>Where did you find the function manage_clone? I searched the book - no reference, just the usage in an example  (Under Extending Zope/Creating a Simple Product). I looked in the Zope Help that comes with zope 2.4.0 - No matches. Finally I searched in the API-Reference at www.zope.org - Nothing.
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>I'm a zope Newbie (one week) and in the last days I often found myself searching for Information over and over again because these sources seem to be incomplete.
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>What am I doing wrong?
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>I believe Zope has a lot of useful functions I can't use because I don't know about.
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The online help does have some shortcomings. I don't know how the API 
docs are generated, but they should either include inherited methods and 
fields or have more comprehensive links to objects they inherit from. 
For example, where is SimpleItem? It has a whole ton of useful and 
common stuff that people should know about.

If they're not automatically generated, perhaps they should be from 
method signatures and docstrings (and this would help documentation in 
the Zope source as a byproduct as well.)

So where do you get information like this if it's not in the docs? Well, 
even if you downloaded the binary package, you've got most of the source 
for Zope sitting on your hard drive, and that's where all this stuff 
originates. Go poke through 'Zope/lib/python/', especially the 'OFS', 
'DocumentTemplate', and 'Products' directories. (The 'manage_clone' 
method is in OFS/CopySupport.) Sure, it requires doing a little Python 
mucking, but your Zope knowledge will be all the better for it.

        --jcc
    (mmm... mucking)