[Zope] Zope 2.5 and TransparentFolder incompatibility

Howard Hansen zope@halfmagic.com
Mon, 10 Jun 2002 16:59:02 -0700


Thanks for the response Sean, but could we try this again?  This is not the
answer I want to hear.  Could you start your message with something like:
"I've patched TF so it will work perfectly with 2.5 and all subsequent
versions...." ;-)

Seriously, this is not the first time I've heard the "TransparentFolders
Considered Harmful" argument, and at some level I'm inclined to agree.  Just
not at the level of someone who has to wade through tons of dinky objects in
his ZMI, nor at the level of someone who has to change lots of his code to
account for other changes.

It's too bad we can't use an underscore at the beginning of an object's id.
Then we could have a "Hidden Contents" tab in the ZMI and view them that
way.  This would give us one transparent folder in each folder.  A boy can
dream.

This leads me to a different question: how safe (or stable) is it to
subclass folder and add some new behaviors to it?  People blithely talk
about doing it all the time, but my Zope sites total between 2000 and 5000
hits an hour.  I get concerned about maintaining stability and performance.
Obviously bad coding = bad performance and/or instability, but assuming
competent coding, can I expect my subclassed folder to work as well as
Folder?

Howard Hansen
http://howardsmusings.com/categories/zope

----- Original Message -----
From: <sean.upton@uniontrib.com>
To: <zope@halfmagic.com>; <dirk.datzert@rasselstein-hoesch.de>
Cc: <zope@zope.org>; <ct@gocept.com>
Sent: Monday, June 10, 2002 3:34 PM
Subject: RE: [Zope] Zope 2.5 and TransparentFolder incompatibility


> TFs are bad bad bad... too much magic to the namespace stack.  They break
> Core Session Tracking in Zope < 2.5, and likely don't work with sessions
in
> Zope 2.5.  The reason for this is that with the session id manager (which
in
> CST has to have the same name every time), you cannot have more than one
> (because TF screws up the namespace stack globally, and makes the session
id
> managers appear to already exist for a folder that they don't, or
something
> like that, I can't remember exactly)...  If you really want the benefits
of
> TF without the headache and unpredictability, your best bet if you want to
> hide/sort objects in a folder is to create your own product, subclass
> folder, and hack the dtml files in the product for the UI to only show
what
> you want (perhaps putting everything else into another ZMI tab or
> something?).
>
> Sean