[Zope3-dev] Indirection Reporter
Shane Hathaway
shane at hathawaymix.org
Mon Feb 13 12:18:24 EST 2006
Here's another idea that occurred to me recently. I suspect this one
needs no vote, but perhaps it should be done sooner than other ideas
like the filesystem-based web root.
I want a way to inspect all of the indirections chosen in the course of
a web request or any other publishing operation. After executing a web
request, Zope will report all of the points where it made a decision
using the component architecture. It will show what decision it made
and which ZCML directive caused it to make that choice.
I can think of three modes of operation. In the first mode, Zope will
record decisions using an indirection reporting utility similar to the
error reporting utility; developers will visit the utility to see the
decisions. In the second mode, developers will add something to the URI
(say, '++debug++indirect') that causes Zope to replace the result of the
request with the indirection report. A third mode is to record the
decisions using the utility but also mangle browser responses, adding a
link to the report at the bottom of every web page. While I like the
third mode best, mangling is evil, so it should be easy to turn it off
and revert to just the first mode.
The report will consist of lines that look something like this, but more
graphical:
zope.app.traversal: traverse(), line 36
Adapted <object x> to INameTraverser, yielding <MyNameTraverser y>.
Configured by 'adapter' directive at myapp/configure.zcml, line 72
I can imagine displaying this information inside differently colored
boxes based on what type of indirection is being made. (One color for
adaptation, another for utility lookup, etc.) I can also imagine
inspecting the stack depth to infer a tree structure, perhaps making the
report easier to read.
The point is to make most indirection transparent to both beginners and
experts. Any time I want to change a decision, I use this utility to
find out what decisions are currently being made, then I copy the
appropriate ZCML directives and paste into my own code and start hacking.
Thoughts? Will it work? Should it be a priority?
Shane
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