Re: State of Plone web api

On 1/15/14, 6:13 PM, Dylan Jay wrote:
> <rant>
> Plone's web api sucks.
> For example setting custom field values on objects via web calls.
> For archetypes
>    - you can't use the .update method Zope traversal doesn't parse *kwargs type method definitions
>    - you can use setFIELDNAME accessors created AT via XMLRPC or normal url. Except that it doesn't work with archetypes.schemaextender fields
>    - you can't use XMLRPC for any method that requires keyword args. So accessors that use keywords args can't use XMLRPC
> WebDAV
>    - doesn't support propfind propset propget for any schema based fields. Only standard fields like Title and creationDate
>    - RFC822Marshaller is used for most types so you can upload all the content + custom fields via a PUT request. Except this isn't used for files or images so there is
>      no way via webdav to set custom fields
> Dexterity
> 	Can't be done for dexterity objects at all that I've worked out. Maybe via RFC822Marshaller and PUT but as above, is unlikely to work for File or Images.
>
> So if you want to set schemaextender or dexterity fields or some kind of consistent api for setting... it just isn't there :(
> Possibly the only way I can think of doing it with out-of-the-box Plone would be to upload a PythonScript that does the setting for me.
>
> </rant>
>
Dexterity does its own rfc822 marshalling using plone.rfc822, and 
plone.namedfile extends that to handle files and images.

Anyway, the reason Plone doesn't have a web-accessible API (I'd consider 
most of the above to be non-web APIs that happen to be semi-accessible 
via HTTP) is because no one's built a good one and seen it through the 
process of getting it added to core. What sort of API *should* we have?


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