[ZPT] passing a list argument from ZPT to python ...

[Dieter Maurer]

erik vogan wrote at 2005-2-17 13:10 -0500:
> ...
>    if they press the "Yes" button, then the ZPT page is supposed to
>pass the same (python) list (again, ['24', '28']) to another python
>procedure that takes the desired action.  however, instead of passing
>a list the ZPT page is passing a string (like: "['24', '28']").

This is not a problem of ZPT but of HTML.

Note, that *ALL* values passed on from HTML are strings.

Zope uses special name suffixes for form data to
convert and package the data again. You find
an introduction in

  <http://www.dieter.handshake.de/pyprojects/zope/book/chap3.html>

In your special case, you must represent the list in your HTML
by a sequence of (probably hidden) form variables of the
form:

	<input type=hidden name="mylist:tokens:default" />
	<input type=hidden name="mylist:list" value="list_element_1" />
	...
	<input type=hidden name="mylist:list" value="list_element_n" />

The ":tokens:default" initializes "mylist" to the empty list
in case there are no list elements. If there are list
elements, it is ignored.

The ":list" tells ZPublisher to collect the values into a list.

Of course, you would use a "tal:repeat" to generate
the sequence of "input" tags for you list values.

-- 
Dieter