[Zope] Assorted questions (long).

[Otto Hammersmith]

Hello all,

FWIW, I've copied the UserDB product (1.3.0) from the old Zope.org site
and created a package. It's cataloged now, but the URL is
http://www.zope.org/Members/otto/userdb.

I've downloaded the beta ZDiscussions product (very nice, BTW) and it
has brought up a question about ZCatalog and classes that inherit from
it. If an object inherits from ZCatalog does that mean it's sub-objects
are only cataloged there? For example, if I create a ZDiscussion topic
how can I have a site wide search interface that will also search the
ZDiscussion items in that topic.

I've done some experimenting and I've found out I can have a ZCatalog
catalog the discussion itself, which is somewhat useful... but there
doesn't seem to be a way to catalog the items outside the discussion.

Wouldn't it make more sense for ZDiscussion to not inherit from ZCatalog
but allow provide a search interface limited to searching discussion? 
It should be easy to limit the search based on meta-type, but I don't
see a way to limit it to a single discussion. Also, to allow the
possibility of keeping the discussion out of the default catalog it
should be possible to create a new catalog as a sub-object of the
ZDiscussion.

On the other hand would it make sense (or is is possible already) to
"chain" ZCatalogs?

Just a few thoughts... :)

My second question is on AUTHENTICATED_USER. What properties does it
have? The DTML User's Guide says "This object currently provides no
public attributes" but the source for ZDiscussions clearly uses some
functions and attributes like getName() and 'email'.  Is this something
that UserDB gives you? (I haven't had the chance to play around with
that much, yet.)

TIA.

			-Otto.