[Zope] Re: including arbitrary files in zope products

[Raja Subramanian]

Hi,

Josef Meile wrote:
> some few month ago, I was trying to do the same: Store a java applet 
> class on the file system and load it dynamically from each instance of 
> my product, but I didn't succeeded. You can see my attempt on:
> 
> http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2004-May/149813.html
> 
> Anyway, I solved it storing the java applet on the Zope DB when 
> initializing my product. The code is attached to the message.

Many thanks for your help.  It's good to know that I'm not alone with
this problem ;-)

I have the following in my product constructor and it seems to work
fine.  It pulls in the contents of applet.jar into Zope on product
instantiation.

    # A small dance to import the java client into Zope
    product_home = Globals.package_home(globals())
    fname = os.path.join(product_home, 'www', 'applet.jar')
    f = open(fname, 'rb') 
    filecontents = f.read() 
    f.close()
    self.manage_addFile('applet.jar', filecontents, 'Applet')

I borrowed the "product_home = Globals..." line from your code.  Thanks!

But this is not optimal because if I change applet.jar (which happens a
lot during development), it is not automatically reflected within Zope.

Oh well! I could call the above code whenever I modify the applet and
some how hook it into product refresh.

Since I have only one jar file and only a couple of product instances,
my problem is manageable.

But in general, how does one go about embedding arbitrary files - like
html/text/pdf/etc - within products and have them automatically
refreshed on Zope init/restart/etc?  Like everything else in zope,
I was imagining that this would be an easy/simple thing to do.

Is there some reason why the Zope Gods left out such a feature?

- Raja

PS: The Zope XML-RPC mechanism and java xmlrpc libs from apache have
    simpilified my application by an order of magitude.  Kudos to the
    Zope developers.