[Zope] Core Session Tracking kudos & namespaces

[Bob Sidebotham]

--- Chris McDonough <chrism@digicool.com> wrote:
> I sympathize with the need to convert all your scripts over to use
> sessioning from hidden form-field encoding and the like... I'd really
> appreciate some input as to what kinds of problems you're trying to
> solve with sessioning.

I don't have any great number of scripts to convert. I've only been
looking at zope for a few weeks. I DO have a significant application
that handles a customer database, supplier ordering, inventory
management and the like. This is currently written in Perl/cgi, and is
way too slow and cumbersome. I'd like to move it into zope and at the
same time make the database directly available to customers. In the
current implementation of the application I maintain a lot of state at
the server side--the server knows the page history, locally configured
options, and the like. In that application I actually force you to use
server-side navigation, since I load over the existing page every time
you make a request (so there is only one page ever resident in the
browser). I did this to make it impossible for the operator to use an
old browser page (with stale form info). This is ugly and requires two
round-trips for each request.

I'm trying to figure out how to move this into zope, and to do this in
the most natural way possible. So I'd like to give up mostly on the
server-side navigation stuff. But I do want to do things like: if you
go from a main page to a form, then if the form succeeds I'd like to
return you directly to the main page (with no extra page fetch). If the
form fails, it might go back to the main page, or include the error
somewhere in the main page. Since the form is likely to be unrelated to
the main page (just linked to from it), I need at least some server
state to tell me where to return. I can also imagine doing side trips
from forms--but that's harder, because then the side trip can't involve
a link, otherwise you lose the information typed in (I "solved" this in
my current implementation by wrapping *every* page in one big form and
making all the links actually do submits, using a little javascript,
but again that's something I'd rather avoid--I'd rather it was simple
and relatively unsurprising).

I'm unclear as to how I should really implement any of this. It almost
seems like there is some sort of abstraction here that can be turned
into a generic facility, but I haven't groked zope enough to figure out
how that would be plugged in and what it would look like.

So anyway, this was supposed to be an answer to your question, but it's
really a thinly disguised attempt to get some design help on this. Is
there another forum purely for design help with this sort of thing? How
to fit a particular navigational abstraction into the zope framework?

Thanks,
Bob


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