[Zope3-dev] opinion requested from people working towards therelease: doctest inaccuracy for zope.app.form.utility

[Garrett Smith]

Rob Jeschofnik wrote:
> Gary Poster wrote:
> 
>> [...]
>> (a) check this in,
>> (b) change the XXX to a TODO and check it in,
>> (c) change the test description to actually describe the current
>> behavior, or (d) try to change the code to match the description?
>> 
>> If (d) is your response, then please also give me a fallback option
>> (a, b, or c) if I don't have time.  As I write in my XXX, I have a
>> workaround already.
> 
> My choice would be option (d) - It really does seem like an error to
> me to accept part of the input of a form that contains some invalid
> items.. how can you gurantee any logic that uses these values is
> correct when there are some invalid inputs? (or have I misunderstood
> the problem at hand?)

Heres the current behavior:

- applyWidgetsChanges will successfully apply any widget changes that it
can; if some fail because of errors, the errors are provided in an
exception; the changes that succeed 'stick'

- the form, noting one or more errors, calls get_transaction().abort(),
to ensure that any changes to the ZODB (or other transactionally managed
data sources) are rolledback

I don't think we want to build transactional support into
applyWidgetsChanges -- it's going to start getting complex and I get
there will be more errors for that approach than using
get_transaction().abort(). I don't see any benefit since we'd have to
abort the transaction anyway to accommodate any side effects of updating
the object.

One could argue that this is "brute force", but I'd say it's worth it to
keep the forms machinery free of transactional logic.

> As for a backup plan... if you didn't have time for it I'd suggest (e)
> leave it as an XXX and raise it as a Collector item, so someone else
> fixes it. I don't really like the idea of changing tests to match
> dodgy code.

I agree wholeheartedly. But in this case, I just think the docs are
wrong, not the code.

 -- Garrett