[ZODB-Dev] Accessing Plone through ZEO back door?

[Christian Robottom Reis]

On Sat, Aug 21, 2004 at 07:37:49PM -0400, Kirby Urner wrote:
> 
> Let me see if I've got this straight:  Zeo serves the ZODB using 
> ClientStorage, but isn't aware of Products, which are at the Zope layer 
> (and above).  So the reason I get errors when doing
> 
>   >>> storage = ClientStorage.ClientStorage(('localhost',8100))
>   >>> db = DB(storage)
>   >>> conn = db.open()
>   >>> root = conn.root()
>   >>> app = root['Application']
>   >>> app.reset()
> 
> regarding no CMFPlone, has to do with Python via ZEO not knowing about 
> Products, yes?

You're probably getting a traceback that complains about a module
loading (peeks below... right!). This happens because you need to have
local access to the modules that implement your Persistent classes --
and the ZODB isn't finding them where it's looking.

> Backing up, is it at all realistic to think about a programmatic back 
> door into a Plone instance, like maybe doing some wxPython GUI thing 
> that is aware of objects created through a Plone frontend?  Is that a 
> supported/encouraged design, or really perverse?

I don't see a problem with it (but I have nothing to do with Plone
either so take that with a grain of salt). We do `backdoors' as you say
like this in out desktop software, and it works quite well.

> I scoured the web for documentation regarding this question, but Zeo 
> seems to be a moving target -- a lot of what I found re configuration 
> and so on seemed to be rather dated.  But if there's stuff I should have 
> read about all this, I'd be happy for some URLs.

This isn't all ZEO-specific. You need to have local access to the
modules. Install them wherever you're opening the ZODB and you'll see
that indeed it works quite well.

> PS:  I thought I might solve the whole issue by putting a path to my 
> zope instance (/var/zope) in PYTHONPATH, but that didn't help.

That sounds odd. It *should* work -- 

> ImportError: No module named CMFPlone.Portal

was this module importable via the python interactive interpreter? If
not, it should!

Take care,
--
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3361 2331