[Zope] people structuring

[Roman Bogoyev]

Hello,

Being new to zope, I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around how to
structure people objects in our dept.  Perhaps this is a common modelling
problem which someone has done before:

We have people, and people may have many different roles.

So for example, a person can be a lecturer and also a fire warden.
Now each person has common properties, and then more specific ones
as a lecturer or fire warden.

So I create a container for common persons, and then containers for
lecturers and containers for fire wardens.  Each is its own class,
with its own properties.  Now with my brain still full of relational
data base concepts, I use each object's id as a key, so to look up
lecturer Joe's telephone number, I say in the context of lecturer,

joe.people.joe.telephone

which is very ugly and path dependent.... furthermore, if Joe the lecturer
has a specific phone number then I want that, not Joe the person's number.

Another way could be to have a getTelephone() method and use aquisition, but
again, that would be structure dependent - all lecturers and firewardens would
have to live in containers within the People container.

So can an object 'inherit/acquire' another object's properties without that object
being a subclass of the other?  Should I forget this altogether and use
ZCatalogues?  Is there something really obvious staring me in the face?

Thanks for any pointers.

Roman.


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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Roman Bogoyev, Computer Systems Manager,      email: roman at maths.uwa.edu.au
UWA Maths, 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley,          phone: +61 8 9380 3379
Western Australia 6009                        fax: +61 8 9380 1028