[Zope] accessing attributes of a referenced object via ZPT

[J Cameron Cooper]

>
>
>I am trying to make a nice display of some objects using ZPT.  These
>objects refer (by storing the path as a string) to other objects and I
>want to display an attribute of the referred-to object in the display.
>
>What is the best design to achieve this?  The following ZPT code
>works, but I highly doubt it is the best design :-)
>  <td tal:content="python:here.restrictedTraverse(employee.department).title" />
>
>Would it be best to write a python script that iterates over the
>actual objects creating a "mirror" object for each that contains the
>attributes to be displayed (without the intermediate references) and
>let the ZPT handle only the mirror objects?
>  
>
That wouldn't be a bad idea, but maybe you can get the catalog to do it 
for you. One wants to avoid traversal when possible. It's expensive.

Possibly also you could have your objects like 'employee' hold 
references instead of paths. I'm not sure how this interacts with 
persistence, but I imagine it would Just Work.

          --jcc