[Zope] A question on how external methods reference modules

[Goldthwaite, Joe]

I've gotten my external module working but It has one little hassle I've been trying to get around.  If I make a change to the module, I have to go back to the management screen -> External method name and click on the Save Changes button.  It looks like this brings the changes into Zope.  Well, I had the bright idea of linking to a stub function that doesn't change and then have the stub function call the real function that's imported.  I figured I could then modify my method without re-loading it into Zope.

I basically created two modules. In module1.py I have my stub function that chains to module2.py.

module1.py

   import module2

   def ReturnData():
      """Return some test data"""
      return module2.GetTheData()

module2.py

   def GetTheData():
      """Return the actual data"""
      return """the actual data"""

I can run this in python and it works.  After the import module2, I can do a dir on the module2 namespace and I see "GetTheData" as one of the items in the list.  When I add module1->ReturnData to the external module in Zope and execute it, I get the error "module 'mytest' module has no attribute 'GetTheData'".
If I modify ReturnData to this;

   import module2
   def ReturnData():
	"""Return some test data"""
      return dir(module2)

the string returned does not show my "GetTheData" function in the list.  I was getting an error that 'module2' wasn't found so I had to append it's path using the sys.path.append function.  Now I'm not getting an error so I think it's finding module2 but it doesn't seem to be finding the function.  I'm confused.  Can anyone explain what's going on?

As a second part of the question, will this allow me to modify the external modules without re-loading them into Zope?




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