[Zope] RE: people structuring

[paulporter at buffalotalks.com]

OK, I am very new to Zope so I might be sending this user on a wild goose
chase without meaning to.  I hope those who are more experienced will jump
in and correct me if I'm wrong; because it is certainly not my intent to
do harm.

I believe that this Zope Product may give you the flexibility you are
looking for.  It is called "GroupUserFolder" and is a group user tool for
Zope.  I am working with it at this time in a similar situation, where I
have Divisions, Units and Users to keep track of. I'm not far enough along
in my efforts however to say with certainly that it will be the answer to
your problem.  You can find this product at:

http://ingeniweb.sourceforge.net/Products/GroupUserFolder/

HTH;

Paul

--------------[Original Message]--------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 17:24:08 +0800
From: Roman Bogoyev <roman at maths.uwa.edu.au>
Subject: [Zope] people structuring
To: zope at zope.org
Message-ID: <3F6EBFB8.3040501 at maths.uwa.edu.au>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed

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.