[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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