[railroad-dev] Some help wanted]

[Julian Davison]

Jan-Wijbrand Kolman wrote:
>>> Maybe I am the only one to think that but I feel there is not too 
>>> much documentation.
>>
>> There doesn't seem to be. I found a couple of key things missing.
>> Particularly with regard to the way RailRoad will call back to your 
>> CMS (in
>> our case, Plone) to determine whether someone has access to an item or 
>> not.
> 
> Admittedly, yes, documentation is lacking... we need to do something 
> about this. There's some more Railroad work planned ahead - I'll make 
> sure documentation gets a more proper place in it.

Time for a wiki? :)

> This is all very usefull to know about. The IE-uploading trouble is of 
> course well known IE behaviour but so easy to overlook when you're 
> developing on a linux-box... I'll create an issue for this right away.

Easy to overlook if you use Firefox under windows too - as I
found out :)

>> I've now got a subclass of PloneRailroadProxy with which we can add 
>> images to
>> our repository and the proxy object makes itself a few (smaller) 
>> copies of
>> the image for folder listings/previews. Subjecting these objects to 
>> Plone's
>> workflow also raised some quirks with the metadata not being unmapped
>> correctly, though I think this was a direct result of a change I made 
>> when
>> trying to solve the metadata issue from above.
> 
> Can you elaborate a little more on this 'loosing metadata' issue? It's 
> not something we found before. It sounds kinda strange to me, I'd like 
> to see if we can find a reason for this.

It's very strange and I presume(d) it's something I've got wrong
somewhere.
What seemed to be happening was that whenever a property of the
Plone object was accessed the code decided that the object was
un-initialised (had no properties) and so it created new (empty)
properties, and saved them to the DAV repository.
Since this happened on each property access (description,
modifiedDate, etc) and as all the properties were initialised
any view/edit of the metadata took ages and resulted in
blank properties.
I commented out a line
     instance = instance.aq_base
in PloneRailroad.RailroadStorage.get and the problem went
away, but I don't seem to have written a note as to why
I reached the conclusion that was a good idea.

>> I presume the subversion repository is as up-to-date as it gets?
> 
> 
> Yes it is.
> 
> As I said, there's some more work planned ahead. Personally I'd really 
> like to move forward but some more pressing matters take precedence at 
> the moment. :| Of course, if there's a way we can cooperate I'm all for it!
> 
> If in the meantime I can be of any help, please also contact me on 
> #railroad.

Ah, but when is it daylight in your neck of the woods? :)




J,