[ZPatterns] a LDAP-AttributeProvider again

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 06:36 PM 6/21/01 +0200, Ulrich Eck wrote:

>I'm not completly shure if I shouldn't implement this as Rack because as far
>as i can see
>I don't have any control about object creation/deletion when I use an
>Attribute provider.
>
>any comments on this ??

Ty and I originally intended to make specialized kinds of racks such as SQL 
racks, LDAP racks, etc., or perhaps specialized attribute providers.  We 
ran into the same types of design questions as you did, however, which led 
to the breakthrough of "generic" providers and ultimately SkinScript.  What 
we do these days is have library objects which supply functions we need to 
use from SkinScript.  Typically this is as a folder containing SQL methods, 
external methods, etc. representing the database.  We then call these 
methods from SkinScript.

In the case of LDAP, we usually use external methods which operate upon a 
ZLDAPConnection (?) object to do the things we need.  We have not found 
enough useful similarities between our varied uses of LDAP to support 
creation of a general-purpose LDAP tool.

In other words, our experience has tended to suggest that custom provider 
objects written in Python aren't all that useful in the general case.  They 
only seem to make sense as a one-off to do something really unusual.