Re: State of Plone web api

On 16 Jan 2014, at 1:24 pm, David Glick (Plone) <david.glick-z4DKO/[email protected]> wrote:

> 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?

An update method on both AT and DX objects that takes a single dictionary of field->value mappings would work for me. A generic set method that takes fieldname and value would also be good.

In an ideal world if plone.api is going into plone then a way to map api calls into web requests. However I don't see anything in plone.api now to set field values [1]. also many of the calls might be hard to convert as they use keyword args and often args that are object references.

[1] http://developer.plone.org/reference_manuals/external/plone.api/api/content.html


> 


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