[Zope] Zope and PDF

[Steve Alexander]

Joachim Schmitz wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I use a different aproach to generate PDF in my simple officemanagement I
> built with Zope and ZPatterns.
> 
> On the inputform for my invoice generator I have a button "write invoice",
> this calls a python script outside of Zope with the invoice-nr as parameter.
> This python programm gets its data from Zope via xml-rpc, it could also
> report back to Zope when it is ready.


That's fine provided these things are true:

1: Your invoice data is immutable. No-one can change it once it has been 
submitted for printing.

2: You don't have times when there's so many invoices being generated in 
parallel that it places a high load on the system.

3: You don't mind about the overhead of starting up ReportLab every time 
you want to generate an invoice.


I solve 1 by writing out the changeable data to a file, 2 by having a 
single queue for generating reports that services all the zope instances 
on a machine, 3 by keeping a long running process to generate reports.

--
Steve Alexander
Software Engineer
Cat-Box limited