[Zope3-Users] Recommend way to ..(question inside)

[Gary Poster]

On Jul 11, 2005, at 9:15 PM, Alec Munro wrote:

> Sorry for the vague subject, but I wasn't sure how to summarize this.
> It's not exactly a Zope question, but perhaps Zope has some tricks to
> make it easier.
>
> In a couple of situations, I want to have a collection of objects, and
> allow users to select from those objects, and personalize them. The
> way I was thinking about this was that I would have a second class of
> objects that contained the additional properties as well as a property
> containing the personalized object. This seems to be similar to the
> way adapters operate. However, generally an adapter is created when
> used, and discarded, correct? What is the recommended way to go about
> this?

Assuming this is for authenticated users, you might want to look at  
zope/app/principalannotation.

As you said, Zope 3 does currently take the tack of transient  
adapters, although there is a common way to effectively have  
persistent adapters.  The Zope 3 transient adapters can store their  
information persistently in annotations or other similar structures:  
object annotations, principal annotations, session data,  or  
elsewhere.  Thus you effectively get persistent adapters, with the  
data compartmentalized, and sometimes discarded, on the basis of how  
you store it.  You can even store instances themselves in these  
annotations, and have the registered adapters just functions that  
look up the instances, creating them if necessary.

As I said, it sounds like you might want the principal annotations  
flavor of this approach.

Gary