[Zope-CMF] Re: [dev] enhancing Actions: a rough proposal

[yuppie]

Hi Lennart!


Lennart Regebro wrote:
> yuppie wrote:
> 
>> Tools are no longer Action providers. Products add their Actions to 
>> the ActionsTool like they add their skin layers to the SkinsTool.
> 
> [...]
> 
>> - Workflow Actions:
>> No idea how they could benefit from the new machinery. If we don't 
>> change them, CMFActionIcons doesn't become obsolete.
> 
> 
> These to are closely related. Workflow actions are basically totally 
> dynamic, and calculated by which transations are valid and have actions.
> Completely removing the ability to be an action provider means that for 
> each workflow transition you have, you have to also create an action, in 
> a completely different part of the site, which "sho me" expression must 
> match the "is possible" expression of the transition.
> 
> So my gut reaction to this is a big -1.

Sorry for the misleading sentence. I don't propose to remove the 
possibility to register Action providers. I just propose to get rid of 
ActionProviderBase.

TypesTool and WorkflowTool handle Actions in a customized way, so those 
two are not so easy to integrate in the proposed machinery. If we don't 
find a satisfying solution for those, we can leave them as they are.

> Making the actions tool an ordered folder and making those actions 
> proper items is fine. But I see no reason why you can't have action 
> providers.

Ok.

> Possibly, instead of the current action provider system, there could be 
> an action provide plugin list, where one simply is an ordered folder, 
> but where DCWorkflow can add it's plugin. But this seems to me just a 
> very complicated way of having action providers...

Don't know if this covers all use cases: Am I right that normally there 
is only a small set of workflow Actions needed by a site, even if it has 
many different workflows? I mean the set of properties like title and 
the URL expression.

If this is the case, a custom plugin workflow category could ask the 
WorkflowTool which workflow actions are available.

> Also, the Five integration of actions and Zope3 menues I'm working on 
> now becomes if not impossible, then really complicated. I think we 
> definitely need a way to still create actions on the fly, and not only 
> have persistent collections of actions.

Yes. That should not be a problem.


Cheers,
	Yuppie