Compatibility

pfg.drafts has been tested with Plone 4 and PloneFormGen 1.6.0.

Installation

1. Add pfg.drafts to your buildout, and activate it via the Plone Add-ons control panel.

2. Go to the Security control panel and turn on “Enable self-registration” and “Let users select their own passwords”. (If the latter is off, users will not be able to immediately register. You may want to add captcha to the registration form to prevent mechanical registrations.)

3. Go to the form for which you want to enable drafts, and change its display layout to “Form View with Drafts”, using the Display menu.

Implementation Details

Drafts are stored in a BTree in a custom tool (portal_fg_drafts), keyed by form UID and user id.

To save form values, Javascript changes the action of the form to go to the custom @@fg_save_draft view, which writes the values to portal_fg_drafts. Any FileUpload objects are marshalled specially into a pickleable FakeFieldStorage object.

When the form is visited, the custom display template (pfg_draft_view.cpt) calls the portal_fg_draft tool’s retrieveDraft method to repopulate the request form with any saved data for the current form and user. Values in the request take precedence over values from the draft, so the saved values won’t clobber new values after a validation error.

When the form is submitted, it is processed via the custom pfg_draft_validate.vpy script. This augments the submitted values with values from the draft (such as fileuploads that were saved but cannot be repopulated) and then processes the form normally. If the form passes validation, the saved draft (if any) is deleted from the portal_fg_drafts tool.

Credits

pfg.drafts was created by Web Collective and David Glick. Thanks to Bryan Wilson and Fulvio Casali.

1.1.2 (2011-01-12)

• Add registerClass to declare an add permission for PFGDraftStorage so that it can be pasted. [davisagli]

1.1.1 (2011-01-06)

• Fix missing import. [davisagli]

1.1 (2011-01-06)

• Make it possible for Managers to load another user’s draft for debugging, by adding debug_user=[username] to the query string. If a draft loaded in this way is submitted, the draft is not removed from the draft storage. [davisagli]

1.0.1 (2011-01-06)

• Make sure file uploads don’t get lost when a draft is saved a second time. [davisagli]

• Fill the correct slot to inject javascript for main_templates based on the classic Plone theme instead of sunburst. [davisagli]

1.0 (2010-12-20)

• Fix error in including widget javascript. [davisagli]

1.0b1 (2010-12-09)

• Initial release