[Zope] Zope app to traverse *external* file system

Phil Harris phil.harris@zope.co.uk
Wed, 21 Mar 2001 22:10:27 -0000


David,

Can I first ask a favour of you?  Please don't send html encoded mail to
this list, lots of us use mailers that don't cope too well with it.  Thanks
in advance.

Now a suggestion to your question.

There exists two maybe more products to help solve your problem, namely,
EXTFile and LocalFS.

Try a search on Zope.org for them.

Phil
phil.harris@zope.co.uk

----- Original Message -----
From: Kulp, David
To: 'zope@zope.org'
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2001 9:50 PM
Subject: [Zope] Zope app to traverse *external* file system


I am trying to decide whether I should take the plunge with Zope.
I will be writing a web app to traverse a large directory tree and
provide fews of the files in this tree.  This sounds, at first, ideal
for zope, since I could create scripts or DHTML methods at the
top of the tree that I can use to generally and systemically
allow users to traverse and view the information -- perhaps
even using the zope tree view.

Alas, this directory tree is external to zope in a real file system.
It is not possible to add these files as objects into zope.
Everything I've read so far deals with objects in zope.  Is there a
straightforward way to use zope to address this while maintaining
most of the nice zope features?

Although not the app I'm actually writing, the idea is similar to,
for example, providing a view of a /home file system.  Special
behavior for the default view might exist for /home/<user>/.
Perhaps a directory of /home/<user>/src would be recognized
as a source code tree for a particular user and special behavior
within that tree would exist -- e.g. comparing a file with a CVS
repository. Different files with extensions or mime-types or special
names are displayed differently.  This sounds a lot like a classic
zope app to me except the data isn't in zope.  The files are live
real files in the file system and are accessed, modified, etc.
outside of the web app.

Any recommendation would be much appreciated!  Is there a nice
zope pattern for this?  If not, can you recommend alternatives?

Much obliged,
David Kulp