[Zope3-dev] IFactory, and composite factories

[R. David Murray]

On Sat, 31 Aug 2002, Jim Fulton wrote:
> R. David Murray wrote:
> > A composite factory looks like:
> > 	c(b(a(context)))
>
> This is when you have:
>    factory="a b c"

Right.  That's how I documented it.

> Note that even for a view, all but the last factory in list
> must be adapters (e.g. "a" and "b" in the example).

Ah!!  Enlightenment strikes.  OK, I will fix the documentation,
unless this is a feature that is going to get deleted.

> I'm not aware that composite factories can be used for anything but
> adapters and views.

OK, SteveA had it wrong then.  He thought it applied anywhere there
was a factory attribute.  I will correct the changes I made to the
docs.

> The factory attribute in ZCML is for creating other kinds of components.
> Adapter factories take a single argument. Resource factories take a
> single argument (the request). View factories take two arguments, context,
> and request. Utility and service factories take no arguments.

And I think I should include this info as well.

> We really don't bother with interfaces for the factories names
> in the ZCML factory attributes, because these factories are not
> components.

Well, there's an IViewFactory interface, and that is certainly helpful
from a documentation point of view if nothing else.  Would there be
any object to my creating such Interfaces just for documentation
purposes?

> AFAIK, nobody is using this feature anymore.

> You are confused because the terminology is a little confusing.
>
> "Factory" is a pretty general term that we are using for two different
> things.

Yeah.  It's appropriate in both contexts, but I'd almost rather
rename the content Factory somehow to create a separation.

--RDM