[Zope] FTP automangling file extension: semi-working proof-of-concept

[Joel Burton]

Yesterday, I suggested that it might be helpful for FTP & WebDAV to return
a pseudo-extension for the type of file being read so that non-Zope-saavy
programs could more effectively work with Zope files. (Some programs,
notably Dreamweaver and GoLive, refuse to work w/files w/o extensions.)
When the file is later uploaded via FTP/WebDAV, the extension would be
removed.

I've tinkered ~30min with the source code and made two very trivial
changes to produce a proof-of-concept. This does the following:

1) in FTP, all files are shown with ".foo" extension
2) when a file is rec'd, the ".foo" is stripped back off

It's __far__ from a real implementation: the extensions would be sensitive
to the type of file being edited; the ".foo" stripping code should check
to see if this is a WebDAV/FTP transfer (right now it *always* strips the
.foo off!), etc. However, even with this trivial patch, it works well
enough to:

1) teach Dreamweaver that .foo files should be edited w/dreamweaver
2) through Zope, create a "test" DTML Document
3) in Dreamweaver+FTP, this test doc shows up as test.foo
4) this can be edited in Dreamweaver and saved
5) the changes appear as "test" in Zope.

What I'd Like:

Is this a fair idea? I doubt the fine folks at ZopeCorp will rush my
three-line patch into the core ;-), but I'd would like to get the sense if
I'm heading in a sane direction.


Obviously, you should apply this patch to a production server:

(patched to the Zope 2.4 source)


[joel@eos joel]$ diff -Naur old new


diff -Naur old/lib/python/OFS/ObjectManager.py
new/lib/python/OFS/ObjectManager.py
--- old/lib/python/OFS/ObjectManager.py Thu Jul  5 15:09:08 2001
+++ new/lib/python/OFS/ObjectManager.py Sat Jul 28 02:38:43 2001
@@ -660,7 +660,7 @@
             try:    stat=marshal.loads(v.manage_FTPstat(REQUEST))
             except: stat=None
             if stat is not None:
-                out=out+((k,stat),)
+                out=out+((k+'.foo',stat),)   # WJB
         return marshal.dumps(out)

     def manage_FTPstat(self,REQUEST):
@@ -689,6 +689,10 @@


     def __getitem__(self, key):
+
+        if key[-4:]=='.foo':   # WJB
+            key=key[:-4]
+
         v=self._getOb(key, None)
         if v is not None: return v
         if hasattr(self, 'REQUEST'):


-- 
Joel Burton   <jburton@scw.org>
Director of Information Systems, Support Center of Washington