[Zope] Sort by content creation date

[sean.upton@uniontrib.com]

Here's a really long and complicated answer to your simple question.
Perhaps someone else can contribute a more simple piece of wisdom, but for
now, here goes:

There may be a way to do this; I'm not sure.  On the other hands, perhaps
you should be using a Catalog for this.  You would get more flexible,
faster, and scalable sorting and retrieval of what you need.  objectValues()
will not scale well to thousands of objects, nor provide for flexible
sorting or slicing (like: "get the first 20 in date order"). 

The alternative: you create a FieldIndex in a Catalog for a string rendering
of the path of the container of your items (news) (note PathIndex will not
work for this at the moment, use a FieldIndex); create a python script that
can be acquired by said folder with the same name as your index that outputs
that path (perhaps containerPathName()).  Store your date in a Catalog
metadata field on indexing, and create an index for your date field (docs
suggest using a DateIndex; I currently use FieldIndex in some old apps I've
done this with, but I think this has drawbacks).  You would then be able to
use dtml-in on a Catalog query, and sort the search results on a real date
value (i.e. Jan 1, 2003 is greater than Dec 31, 2002) or obtain a specific
range or batch size.  The contents (and backtalk) of chapter 11 of the
online Zope Book have a fairly decent amount of info on using Dates in
Catalog searches
(http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/current/SearchingZCatalog.
stx).

Best of all, from a performance standpoint, assuming you store just enough
info in the metadata fields, you get just enough data to sort on without
having to get an object to sort on one of its attributes via
Catalog.getObject() or the ObjectManager.objectValues() you use now.

Is this making any sense?  I haven't tried this exact approach myself, but
am in the middle of doing just this to speed up some skins in a CMF site I'm
building so that it can scale to handle thousands of objects in a folder
(but only show me, say, 20 at a time, and in a given order).

Sean

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Romano [mailto:patrickromano@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2002 3:24 AM
To: zope@zope.org
Subject: [Zope] Sort by content creation date


I want to sort a certain number of Kubes by their content creation date, 
which is   DD/MM/YY,
but if I do it like that

<dtml-in expr="news.objectValues('Kube')"  sort="content_creation_date">

the Kubes are sorted by date starting from the left : sorted by DD first.
How can I achieve to have it soted by YY without changing the order of my 
date (DD/MM/YY)?

Thanks,
Patrick



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