[Zope3-dev] pattern exploration: view chains (xslt, pdf, etc.)

[Steve Alexander]

Gary Poster wrote:
> Working on 
> http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/ManageStaticTextContent
> made me ponder about how to handle a use case like this:
> 
> I have some static xml (non-xhtml) documents in a file in Zope.  Let's say, 
> hypothetically, I uploaded an Excel spreadsheet and used xls2xml to convert 
> it to XML.
> 
> What if I want to see this in html?
> 
> What if I want to see this in a pdf?
> 
> What I came up with is the idea of view chains.  Imagine this, for instance:
> 
> mysite.com/sales.xml/xhtml.xslt;view/htmltopdf;view
> 
> or what if I had a zpt I wanted to convert to pdf
> 
> mysite.com/myZPT/default;view/htmltopdf;view
> 
> I can think of some ways of making this work (views would need marker 
> interfaces, for one; and I have some other thoughts), but I first wanted to 
> see if this seemed like a useful idea, or if folks had a better idea on how 
> to accomplish this sort of thing.  Thoughts?

I've implemented a container traversal that gives a different view 
depending on the file extension given. So, mydocument.txt gives you the 
txt;view which renders plain ascii. mydocument.html gives you html;view, 
and mydocument.pdf invokes ReportLab to send back a PDF.

There's one small change I need to make to the BaseRequest interface to 
make this non-crufty.

The same change makes the JobBoardEx slightly less crufty.

More on this later...

--
Steve Alexander