Writing widgets for zope.formlib

Published: Mar 10, 2012 by Noe Nieto

WARNING This post is incomplete.

I’m doing some interesting things on Grok. Sometimes you need to customize the default widgets that zope.formlib gives you. So, hopefully, this guide will summarize it.

Intro

On this blog post, I’m trying to clarify how does zope.formlib works and how to make custom widgets for web apps.

My background is Electronics Engineering, and sometimes I have trouble with some concepts on the Computer Science field. If you find something misleading or wrong/stupid, I encorage you to drop a comment. I will appreciate it.

Finally, some examples are targeted towards the Grok framework. But is very likely that with proper porting, the examples will run as well on BlueBream or maybe Plone.

The ZCA and how does stuff is glued together

Where do we start? Let’s try A comprehensive Guide to Zope Component Architecture. This guide shows you how do the basic building blocks of Zope works.

According to the author, the ZCA is:

[...] a Python framework for supporting component based design and programming. It is very well suited to developing large Python software systems. The ZCA is not specific to the Zope web application server: it can be used for developing any Python application. Maybe it should be called as Python Component Architecture.

And yes, the ZCA is used in several software projects outside Zope.

One of the most common use cases for the ZCA is doing some kind of CRUD along with ZODB. And the main actor in this user case is the interface (zope.interface.Interface). This is very important. For example, in Grok, you use an interface for defining attribubtes of persistent objects as well as to generate Add and Edit forms automagically.

from zope.interface import Interface
from zope import schema

class IFruit(Interface):
    color = schema.Text(title=u'Fruit color')

The class IFruit defines an attribute called color. By using the fields defined in the zope.schema package, we get very useful functionality for free, like server-side validation. But, also, we can get automatic form generation.

import grok

class FruitEditForm(grok.EditForm):
    grok.context(IFruit)
    form_fields = grok.AutoFields(IFruit)

And, in order to leverage to this functionality, Grok resorts to grokcore.formlib, which, in turn, uses zope.formlib package.

The grok.EditForm class is a specialized class which inherits functionality from grok.View and some bits of zope.formlib.form.EditForm.

To save the data, the class grokcore.EditForm defines an action “Apply” (which will be rendered as an HTML button), and is also a callback function which will call grok.EditForm.applyData() with the parsed and sanitized form data and ultimately, call zope.formlib.apply_data_event() and applies the form supplied data into the context, which is the Python object that provides the interface IFruit.

And to display the form, the thing goes like this:

• User request a resource (e.g. http://site/myfruit/edit), the resource gets mapped to the FruitEditForm, thanks to acquisition and the rest of the zope machinery.

• To render the form, the FruitEditForm class is instantiated and provided with context information and the corresponding request variables.

• Then, when the FruitEditForm it is called, first it runs the self.update_form() and finally it returns to the http publishing process whatever self.render() returns.

• The self.update_form() calls the update() method in all superclasses. This is because the forms defined in zope.formlib have update and render() methods with different context than what grok provides them.

  • Eventually, python will execute the code in the update() method of zope.formlib.form.FormBase. That method will execute self.setupWidgets() and manipulate self.form_reset, self.form_result, self.errors and self.status.

• The render() method is implemented by the grokcore.formlib.components.GrokForm class. It renders the form, either by using a form template, or by whatever action are defined in self.form_result. The render() method from zope.formlib.form.FormBase is not executed.

The setupWidgets() method

The setupWidgets() method is the one in charge of selecting widgets for each object self.form_fields:

Takes the interface of each object of self.form_fields

Aquí ya me confundí.

Cómo se conecta un widget con un field de self.form_fields?