[Erp5-users] A question regarding ERP5Types

[Alexey Morozov]

Hello!

Tony Losey writes:
> You may want to check out plone.org and a product for plone called
> archetypes......It sounds like archetypes will cover what you need.

Thank you for your advice. However it seems that Plone's Archetypes is a
bit more heavy-weight and dependent on Plone than we currently would
like to have.

Does your answer mean that ERP5Types isn't really suitable for our needs?

Generally speaking it seems that we would like to 'drift' our solution
toward ERP5 (slowly enough though because our users won't like any
radical changes in interface and business-processes covered by our tool).

Thank you in advance,
Alexey Morozov


> Alexey Morozov wrote:
> 
>> Hello!
>>
>> I'd like to ask if there's a documentation about programming w/
>> ERP5Types beside the Kevin's tutorial which is more ERP5-centric.
>>
>> Currently I'm not sure if ERP5Types is an appropriate tool for us, so
>> please tell me if I'm wrong about its functions and possibilities.
>>
>> To describe what I'm looking for let me first describe what we have now
>> and what we need (in future). Right now we have a custom /solution/
>> which includes a Zope site (some parts w/ CMF, some just pure
>> DTMLs/ZSQLs etc) which acts as "an inventory and support" application.
>> Some parts of this solution are ZODB-level stuff (DTMLs, scripts, ZSQLs
>> etc) describing users interface to the relational database. This stuff
>> is partially auto-generated from the [database] scheme using Apache
>> velocity engine w/ custom templates. In the generated area "classes" are
>> represented as Folders in Zope, their methods and properties are
>> DTML methods, ZSQLs, python scripts etc.
>>
>> Now we have a growing need to make a transition from these
>> "pseudo-classes" to real (disk-based?) python classes which instances
>> could be put into ZODB (smth like Formulator forms but we need
>> a richer set of properties types and these properties could be 'complex
>> types' defined earlier). Well, it seems that these classes should be
>> generated from declarative descriptions (i.e. class name, properties
>> list w/ their types and a list of possible actions w/ object instances
>> like 'show itself', 'edit itself' etc). We also need in a really near
>> future to track changes in instances of these classes and have an
>> instance-based security settings, so transition from RDBMS to ZODB seems
>> feasible.
>>
>> That is I'm looking for a way to generate these classes and to minimize
>> well, intellectual efforts to do everything correctly. Probably it would
>> be wise to use an existing technology/product for Zope, which could
>> provide necessary functionality for the generator. As far as I
>> understand ERP5Types could be used for this, but is it a really worth
>> idea? Could it be efficiently used without the rest of ERP5 (I know that
>> it doesn't depend on it directly)? What are possible
>> problems and objections? Are there developer-level docs for it?
>>
>> I'm really sorry for the long introduction to few short questions but I
>> don't know how to describe what I need shortly. Thank you for your
>> attention.
>>
>> Alexey Morozov.