[Zope3-dev] widget question: propertyNames/getValue

[Gary Poster]

Gary Poster wrote:
> I'd really like a schema of the configurables, though, because then we 
> could make zcml do one of those "if I don't know the attribute I'll try 
> to see if the widget class's schema knows about it, and use it to cast 
> the zcml value" tricks.  You know, one of those.  :-)  So we could have
> <addform ...>
>   <widget class=".widgets.DatePicker" format="%Y-%m-%d" />
> </addform>
> 
> where format is cast as appropriate, as defined in the widget 
> configuration schema (ok, it's easy in this case, but you see what I 
> mean), and then CustomWidgetFactory is called with the class, setting 
> the format.
> 
> That would be nice.  Generating a view class on the file system just to 
> make my text field display at 50 characters wide feels overly heavy to me.
> 
> Gary

More thoughts on this, as we near the landing of Garrett's 
widget-geddon. :-)  I'm hoping to implement what I discuss here, so this 
is request for comments.

In line with what I said above, I'd like to be able to explicitly 
override labels in zcml too.

<addform ...>
   <widget class=".widgets.DualListWidget">
     <label id="available_items" value="Available Vehicles" />
     <label id="selected_items" value="Selected Vehicles" />
   </widget>
</addform>

This would let the zcml component of the message id extraction tool 
catch these sorts of changes.  Implementation-wise, my first take on 
this is to have a label dictionary as part of the widget interface...and 
this would also mean that every widget would have to get display text 
from this dictionary in order to play nicely.  Garrett, do you have any 
concerns?  Is this something you're already beginning to address? 
Anyone else?

(Thanks to Philipp and Jim for recently clarifying the ZCML message id 
story for me, btw :-)

Gary