[Zope-Moz] PropertyView - The story so far

[Paul Everitt]

Shalabh Chaturvedi wrote:
> I haven't made a lot of progress here mainly because this endeavour is tougher
> than I expected (and I haven't spent a lot of time on it either ;-)
> 
> Issues have come up in both RDF generation and UI because there are all these
> different kinds of properties : string, boolean, tokens, selections etc, each
> having with its own data structure and possible UI widget. This makes it
> possible to represent the properties in various ways in the RDF as well as the
> UI. After considering (and at times half-way implementing) the various
> possibilities, I decided to do a very basic thing that at least works.

That's a wise idea!

> What it's turning out to look like (and I don't seem to like the way its going)
> can be seen here:
> http://www.zope.org/Members/shalabh/Mozilla/propview.gif
> (Please ignore the top three buttons - they are there for debugging purposes
> only)

I like it, seemingly more than you. :^)

> Myself, I haven't really used Zope as such for any real site. Fellow zopistas
> who have been using Zope would probably have a good idea of what they want for
> a useful PropertyView. So, I would greatly appreciate any comments,suggestions
> or ideas you may have.

For the sake of discussing the future, here are some things about
properties that we hope show up this year.

We'd like to see an intersection of properties (and property sheets),
RDF, "wizards", and relational databases.

For instance, it might be easier to build and maintain forms in
complicated applications if the properties kept certain "hints" about
how they were to be used.  In this, a property definition might also
contain things like:

  o title (for a label that appears beside a form element)

  o description (for popup help when you mouse over a property)

  o size/width (for input or textareas)

  o constraints (limit choices to a set, range, formula, etc. expressed
on the client)

  o permissions (this role can't see it, can see it but can't change it,
can't change it)

  o etc.

If this were done, forms could be generated and perhaps even
re-generated automatically.  Lots of people in the Zope community are
doing work in this area.  Also, RDBMS tables (or IMAP, LDAP, etc.) have
similar metadata to make form building easier.

Concerning our efforts here, if Zope itself had this metadata handy, it
would be easier to generate alternative interfaces such as the Zope
Studio.

However, it also raise the bar conceptually on what needs to be done for
a property inspector.  Perhaps the screen looks different based on your
role, thus hiding complexity.  Perhaps the complexity is partitioned
into tabs in a tabbed dialog box.

--Paul