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Latest Issue
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Letter from the Editor:
 Welcome
Interviews:
In our first issue we interview the father of the Wiki and the inventor of Extreme Programming.
Ward Cunningham
Tutorials:
Throughout the quarter we cover topics of interest to Zope developers, designers, and users.
MetaFlow
Databases and ZPTs
Custom User Folders
Zope and CSS
Intranets
Product Review:
Every two weeks we review a new Zope Product
Z Shrink
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Downloads:
Products we talk about in this issues Articles and Reviews
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Illustration by Brendan Davis
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| Creating a Database User Interface with Zope Page Templates. |
Databases and Zope Page Templates
Creating a Database User Interface with Zope Page Templates
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Kristoph Kirchner | March 28, 2002
The Idea
A couple of weeks ago I had to take over as the webmaster of a homepage which was using a mySQL
database to manage news, a forum, a chat, a guestbook and some other things. I administrated this
database using phpMyAdmin. It was the first time I had worked with phpMyAdmin and I was fascinated
by it. For those of you who do not know phpMyAdmin, it is an easy to use interface which not only
provides access to the data within the database tables so that you can add, edit or delete entries,
but it also lets you redefine the table rows, add new ones or delete existing ones, add new tables
easily, make dump files of your database and much more. You do all this by using the forms of
phpMyAdmin, and you can also use a textarea to execute SQL statements.
When I was asked to write an article about using ZPTs with databases, I immediately thought of
phpMyAdmin and decided to adapt it so it could be used with Zope and (if possible) with all
databases for which there is an adapter for Zope. In my case, I started out using Microsoft
Access for a database because I found it fairly easy to use and I already had it
installed on my machine.
Since phpMyAdmin is a powerful tool, I’ve decided, for the sake of this article, to make a simple
Zope version. I’m going to continue to try to improve it such that it is as good as the original
phpMyAdmin. In the coming months I will write more about my experience doing that.
Giving the Pages an Identical Face
Since I did not want to repeatedly write the same code and I wanted to have all pages look alike,
I used a Zope Page Template in which the header and body where defined. To use this predefined
code for all pages, it had to be a macro. ZPT macros are defined using METAL, the Macro Expansion
for the Template Attribute Language (TAL). As with TAL, METAL attributes are defined in normal
HTML-tags:
ZPT standard_template.pt
<html metal:define-macro="main_page">
...
</html>
I defined the main macro in the ZPT standard_template.pt. Thereafter, I called this macro in
each of the templates which make up the SimpleZPTmyAdmin site:
e.g. ZPT tab_properties.html
<html metal:use-macro="here/standard_template.pt/macros/main_page">
...
</html>
As this code overwrites everything on a page (thus all pages using this macro would look
exactly the same), I had to define slots in the macro where different content could be placed
on each page. Slots are defined within a macro, i.e. between the start-tag and the end-tag of
a macro, as follows:
<html metal:define-macro="main_page">
...
<body bgcolor="#F5F5F5" text="#000000" background="images/bkg.gif">
<div metal:define-slot="main_content">
...
</div>
</body>
</html>
Now I had a space within the body of a page to fill with different forms and tables to show,
for example, a database table’s properties or its content or whatever else I wanted to show.
But to be able to use that, I had to say in each page specifically that I wanted to make use
of the slot:
<html metal:use-macro="here/standard_template.pt/macros/main_page">
...
<"body bgcolor="#F5F5F5" text="#000000" background="images/bkg.gif">
<div metal:define-slot="main_content">
...
</div>
</body>
</html>
Next, I was ready to create the pages that would make it possible to see, create,
edit and delete databases, their tables and contents.
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