Re: Options for making AT schemas more adaptive

On Mon, 10 Apr 2006 21:27:29 +0100, Roché Compaan  
<roche-kb4xc5yObU3kQYj/0HfcvhBnub05S5/[email protected]> wrote:

> You said ATSENG scares you in the "re-using content types" thread and
> I'd like to know why. Especially since it solves your Poi problems with
> very little effort. We build most of our content types using ATSENG
> these days and it really is such a painless way to add a lot more
> flexibility to a product.

It scares me because it persists the schema in the ZODB in the way that  
makes it harder to find and update in the future, and be cause it carries  
a performance penalty (I don't know how much better it's gotten recently,  
though).

It also is primarily aimed at being used TTW. In fact, letting  
administrators manipulate the schema TTW isn't terribly useful in a lot of  
cases. Take Poi for example - yeah, you could make the 'details' field  
into a rich text field, but that would also require changes to the  
mail-out handling. If you add a field, it won't make it into my view  
template unless I explicitly made allowances for it, and even then it'd be  
difficult to know where to lay it out. If I weren't careful to stop you  
 from removing a given field, that may break the application in subtle ways.

However, the main point is that this isn't a way of re-using content types  
in other content types. It's a way of making (some) fields of the schema  
editable by site admins. In fact, in a tracker like Poi, it wouldn't be  
unreasonable to (optionally) let the admin add a few StringFields,  
essentially, to capture additional information. I'm less interested in  
doing that integration work myself, but it could happen in the future  
(subject to scrutiny like above - it must be an optional dependency and it  
must not make the rest of the code harder to understand and ... re-use).

> I'm not saying don't use funky Z3 adapters to solve our problems in the
> long run. I do however feel that ATSENG adds something to AT right now
> that very few frameworks have: easy through the web customisation of
> fields. Keep this in mind when move AT along to Zope 3.

It is true. It just doesn't solve the problem I was trying to solve. :)

Martin

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