[Zope] dynamic update of MSWord-Documents from local FileSystem

[complaw@hal-pc.org]

What you are looking for, essentially, is a portion of a document management
system.  Yes, there are people on the Zope list that want to do what you
described (i.e., updating Zope with the updated file information).  I think you
should look at the External File/ External Image Product (ExtFile/ExtImage,
which you can find by looking for ExtFile-1.1.3.tgz on the Zope site).  That
product will allow you to keep only the meta data on Zope, while the file itself
resides on the file system.  

The next step would be to have Zope update the data automatically.  For that,
you need a trigger or something like a cron job (in the *nix world).  There has
been some debate and knashing of teeth on this subject and I'm not sure that
there has been a satisfactory answer.  There are, however, a set of products
called compress_datafs.fcm, backup_zope.fcm, Xron-0-0-9.tgz and pack-db_fs that
use cron to backup Zope or otherwise run cron.  You might look at that to see
how they do it (but your site must be secure enough to run a cron job).  Then
you would simply schedule a cron job to scan the external file system and update
the meta data for the various objects.

For a full blown document management syste, the next step (something that I'm
working on) is to have the user's save/retrieve files from the file system and
use Zope to retain the version/checkout status.  Those are the key functions of
a document management system.  It would also require some type of macro for the
word processors.  A way to do that might be to add an ftp client on the word
processor and have a dialog box prompt the user for the information which would
then be sent to Zope.

Good luck,

Ron





> Dear List,
> 
> and in the same way to my first question about xml-documtents is it possible
to link
msword-documents residing in the local filesystem to zope via the
MSWord-Document Product,
the Word-Munger Product or by any other means dynamically. So that changes in
the external
word-document are reflected in zope on the fly and I could reference to the
content by
dtml-var?
> 
> If somebody knows about that or has done it, I would be very thankful for some
hints how
to do it?
> 
> Elena
> 
> 
> 
> 
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