May2003

Automatic organisation of your news folder — by antonh — last modified 07-Sep-06 11:48 AM

I posted a recipe on "ZopeLabs":http://www.zopelabs.com/ a while back which allowed for the creation of a 'Post News' action which would automatically create a News Item in the current folder and take you straight to the metadata_edit_form. But now I've improved it to group these created news items by monthly folders...

Learning the Oracle Data Dictionary — by antonh — last modified 07-Sep-06 11:48 AM

I'm just learning Oracle, and just stumbled across the DESCRIBE statement which will tell you all about your table.

Autonumber columns in Oracle — by antonh — last modified 07-Sep-06 11:48 AM

In Access and SQL Server, you can set a field to be of type Autonumber. It then automatically increments the value in the field every time you add a new record. Oracle doesn't have this field type, but you can do it. Instructions follow.

RedHat, Unicode and funny characters in man pages — by antonh — last modified 07-Sep-06 11:48 AM

I could never work out why I always got strange characters in man pages. But I recently discovered the reason, and the solution. It all has to do with RedHat 8 turning on Unicode support by default...

Retrieving a list of items - here and everywhere — by antonh — last modified 07-Sep-06 11:48 AM

There are of course multiple ways to do things. When I first learned how to get a list of items of a particular type from a folder, I was pretty happy. Now I've finally realised that you don't necessarily want to limit yourself to the current folder. What follows is my first unassisted expedition into the ZCatalog.

Inserting Data using ZSQL Methods — by antonh — last modified 07-Sep-06 11:48 AM

I'm writing a database frontend app in Zope. There are a few ways to make this process a little more streamlined...

Handling database errors in ZSQL — by antonh — last modified 07-Sep-06 11:48 AM

When you don't like the error messages you're getting in Zope, and you want to use a python try..except approach to insert/delete/update, you are faced with a number of options...

Why X when you can VNC? — by antonh — last modified 07-Sep-06 11:48 AM

Up until thisafternoon I had been using X-Win32 as a way of having a remote X session running on our development server. But I'm dumping it in favour of VNC.

Keeping Users Logged In to the CMF — by antonh — last modified 07-Sep-06 11:48 AM

Yes, it's potentially dangerous, but I really like the way "perlmonks.org":http://perlmonks.org/ lets you stay logged in from day-to-day. I'm using Zope on an Intranet site, so I wanted to set this for a CMF Site. Instructions follow.

Cross-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor for Zope — by antonh — last modified 07-Sep-06 11:48 AM

I'm interested in WYSIWYG text editor components, but because I use Mozilla, I've never really gone in for the CMFVisualEditor. Besides which, it isn't installed on my Zope host. Read on for details of my experiments with HTMLArea by interactivetools.com.

Mimicking Oracle's DEFINE statement using the data dictionary — by antonh — last modified 07-Sep-06 11:48 AM

You can't put DESCRIBE TABLE in a ZSQL method without getting an ORA-00900 (invalid SQL) error, so I had to work out how to roll my own, using the Data Dictionary Tables.