[Zope] Help! How would I use Oracle for persistence?

[Andreas Kostyrka]

On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, Bradford Hull wrote:

> 1) Where do I put the python files to use in an External Method?  Here, the 
> documentation offers a couple of highly ambiguous hints (Put them in the 
> Extensions directory of your Zope directory, which directory you may have 
> to create.  OK, that narrows it down to maybe a dozen that this term could 
> refer to.  Or an Extensions directory under your product (lib/python/
> Products/<myProduct>/Extensions) - now that's the least ambiguous one, but 
> I can't help suspecting there's a key fact or 60 being left out here...
> Since most of the rest of the documentation assumes you already know almost
> everything you need, and refrains from 'repeating' it.
Well, ZOPE does know about two special directories: SOFTWARE_HOME and
INSTANCE_HOME. The first is the directory that extracting the Zope tar.gz
created. The second one happens to contain your access file, the var
directory, etc.

You can have the External directory in both of these.

> 2) Can an External Method, or more to the point, an Extension, get at other 
> Zope objects?  If so, I can use the Oracle connection I put in my folder 
> and which is obligingly open.  If so, how?  This doesn't come up in any of 
> the examples.
Well, you "oracledb" object is just self.oracledb. Which methods it does
support is, to my knowledge, only documented in the 100% correct reference
document, the source :)

> Answers to these two may let me do some trivial prototyping so I can find 
> out if this thing is as wonderful as it looks.  I assume it must be, 
> because everybody keeps making sense in their praise of this obviously 
> wonderful design.  I'll be willing to accept the idea that I'm a fool not 
> to use Bobo, too, but I still need these answers to stand a chance either 
> way.
Well, as having been one of the last Bobo supporters, I'm not that sure
that you are right. (or that I've been right)

For most cases ZOPE as a whole is best. Actually, I can envision only some
cases where ZPublisher alone might make sense, for example small web
applications that aren't modified by the user, but do work much on file
data sources.

> I'll be delighted to help make documentation improvements, because if it is 
> this great, it deserves to be useable by everybody.  Frankly, the 
> documentation as it stands is great marketing material, but maddening if you 
> want to insert and update data in a database, or indeed add/update data at 
> all.
Well, for inserting, updateing you don't need external methods, Z SQL
Methods are more than ok for this :)

Andreas
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Andreas Kostyrka                     | andreas@mtg.co.at
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