[Zope] - Ugh. Missing __doc__ causes major headaches

Gabe Wachob gwachob@findlaw.com
Thu, 14 Jan 1999 21:44:28 -0800


I spent a few stupid hours tracking this down...

ZPublisher will complain that a "document cannot be found" if a method
being referred to in a URL does not have a doc string (ie __doc__ or the
''' ...''' at the beginning of the method definition). Now, I remember
reading something about this (doc strings required to make Bobo objects
published) in the Bobo documentation back when bobo was the new hot
thing, but it took me several hours to realize this was the problem
tonight. I didn't see this mentioned in the Zope dox, and it had
completely slipped my mind. Of course, now that I've found the problem,
I see where its mentioned in the ORB Documentation.

Someone might want to highlight this somewhere (a FAQ?). I was thinking
a Product "Checklist" would be very useful. Also, examples of Folderish
items...

I ended up figuring out tonight's problem by following the stack trace
and seeing that a missing __doc__ string causes the misleading (causing
me a lot of my lost time) "document cannot be found" message. I noticed
that there was a debug flag that would have probably gotten me to the
problem quicker -- how do I turn that on?

Anyway, I'm very happy to finally be able to make some forward progress
and i hope to have my little XML/XSL product working soon!

    -Gabe