[Zope] Persistent form variables

[Steven Sartorius]

Let me preface this by saying I'm a Zope newbie.....

I've started to build a simple site with Zope but am at a crossroads.  The
initial page of the site is a form that would be filled in by a new visitor;
someone who's been to the site before would see the data that they had last
input.  I don't want to use cookies, not everyone turns them on. Obviously
some kind of data persistence is called for on the server side.  My question
is:  is there an easy, idiomatic Zope way of doing this?  Culling through
the documentation ('The Zope Book', various How-To's) I've seen plenty of
examples of creating persistent data with ZODB but all these examples focus
on using ZODB outside the Zope framework.  I guess I could write a
Script/External Method to: 1) check for the existence of a database file; 2)
create it if it doesn't exist; 3) check for the existence of user data; 4)
display the data if exists; 5) display a blank form if there's no data for a
user...etc, etc, etc.

Is there an easier way to do this?  A Product I don't know about or an
elegant Zope trick?  Any and all help appreciated....


thanks,

Steve