plone.app.dexterity 2.0.19

Dexterity is a content type framework for CMF applications, with particular emphasis on Plone. It can be viewed as an alternative to Archetypes that is more light-weight and modular.

Table of Contents

• Introduction

• Philosophy

• Getting started

• Upgrading

• Documentation

• Mailing list

• Issue tracker

• Support

• Contributing

• Release Notes

  • Grok-style configuration no longer included by default

  • Relation support no longer included by default

    • Using relations via plone.app.relationfield

  • Content tree and Autocomplete widgets no longer included by default

• Changelog

  • 2.0.19 (2017-08-14)

  • 2.0.18 (2016-05-10)

  • 2.0.17 (2015-10-28)

  • 2.0.16 (2015-09-28)

  • 2.0.15 (2015-08-14)

  • 2.0.14 (2015-07-30)

  • 2.0.13 (2015-04-23)

  • 2.0.12 (2014-09-07)

  • 2.0.11 (2013-12-07)

  • 2.0.10 (2013-09-16)

  • 2.0.9 (2013-08-13)

  • 2.0.8 (2013-05-23)

  • 2.0.7 (2013-04-09)

  • 2.0.6 (2013-04-06)

  • 2.0.5 (2013-04-06)

  • 2.0.4 (2013-03-05)

  • 2.0.3 (2013-01-17)

  • 2.0.2 (2013-01-01)

  • 2.0.1 (2012-08-31)

  • 2.0 (2012-08-30)

  • 1.0 - 2011-05-20

  • 1.0rc1 - 2011-04-30

  • 1.0b4 - 2011-03-15

  • 1.0b3 - 2011-02-11

  • 1.0b2 - 2010-08-05

  • 1.0b1 - 2010-04-20

  • 1.0a7 - 2010-01-08

  • 1.0a6 - 2009-10-12

  • 1.0a5 - 2009-07-26

  • 1.0a4 - 2009-07-12

  • 1.0a3 - 2009-06-07

  • 1.0a2 - 2009-06-01

  • 1.0a1 - 2009-05-27

Introduction

Dexterity wants to make some things really easy. These are:

• Create a “real” content type entirely through-the-web without having to know programming.

• As a business user, create a schema using visual or through-the-web tools, and augment it with adapters, event handlers, and other Python code written on the filesystem by a Python programmer.

• Create content types in filesystem code quickly and easily, without losing the ability to customise any aspect of the type and its operation later if required.

• Support general “behaviours” that can be enabled on a custom type in a declarative fashion. Behaviours can be things like title-to-id naming, support for locking or versioning, or sets of standard metadata with associated UI elements.

• Easily package up and distribute content types defined through-the-web, on the filesystem, or using a combination of the two.

Philosophy

Dexterity is designed with a specific philosophy in mind. This can be summarised as follows:

Reuse over reinvention

As far as possible, Dexterity should reuse components and technologies that already exist. More importantly, however, Dexterity should reuse concepts that exist elsewhere. It should be easy to learn Dexterity by analogy, and to work with Dexterity types using familiar APIs and techniques.

Small over big

Mega-frameworks be damned. Dexterity consists of a number of specialised packages, each of which is independently tested and reusable. Furthermore, packages should have as few dependencies as possible, and should declare their dependencies explicitly. This helps keep the design clean and the code manageable.

Natural interaction over excessive generality

The Dexterity design was driven by several use cases that express the way in which we want people to work with Dexterity. The end goal is to make it easy to get started, but also easy to progress from an initial prototype to a complex set of types and associated behaviours through step-wise learning and natural interaction patterns. Dexterity aims to consider its users - be they business analysts, light integrators or Python developers, and be they new or experienced - and cater to them explicitly with obvious, well-documented, natural interaction patterns.

Real code over generated code

Generated code is difficult to understand and difficult to debug when it doesn’t work as expected. There is rarely, if ever, any reason to scribble methods or ‘exec’ strings of Python code.

Zope 3 over Zope 2

Although Dexterity does not pretend to work with non-CMF systems, as many components as possible should work with plain Zope 3, and even where there are dependencies on Zope 2, CMF or Plone, they should - as far as is practical - follow Zope 3 techniques and best practices. Many operations (e.g. managing objects in a folder, creating new objects or manipulating objects through a defined schema) are better designed in Zope 3 than they were in Zope 2.

Zope concepts over new paradigms

We want Dexterity to be “Zope-ish”. Zope is a mature, well-designed (well, mostly) and battle tested platform. We do not want to invent brand new paradigms and techniques if we can help it.

Automated testing over wishful thinking

“Everything” should be covered by automated tests. Dexterity necessarily has a lot of moving parts. Untested moving parts tend to come loose and fall on people’s heads. Nobody likes that.

Getting started

Please read the installation guide to get Dexterity up and running.

Then log in to Plone, go to Site Setup, and go to the Dexterity Types control panel to get started creating content types through the web.

Or read the Dexterity Developer Manual to get started developing Dexterity content types on the filesystem.

The 2.0.x release series of Dexterity is compatible with and included with Plone 4.3.

Upgrading

If you are upgrading from a previous release of Dexterity, you need to:

1. Update your buildout with the new versions (or extend the updated KGS), and re-run it.

2. Restart Zope.

3. Go to the Add-ons control panel in Plone Site Setup, and run the upgrade steps for “Dexterity Content Types” if there are any available.

Documentation

Various documentation is available:

• Dexterity Developer Manual

• How to create reusable behaviors for Dexterity types

The following documents are not Dexterity-specific, but will likely be useful to users of Dexterity:

• Schema-driven forms manual

• five.grok manual

Mailing list

The dexterity-development group provides a place to discuss development and use of Dexterity.

Issue tracker

Please report issues via the Plone issue tracker.

Support

Dexterity use questions may be answered via Plone’s support channels.

Contributing

Most Dexterity code is owned by the Plone Foundation and maintained in the Plone github repository. We’re happy to share commit access so that you can share code with us, but first you must sign the Plone contributor agreement.

Dexterity wouldn’t be possible without the hard work of a lot of people, including:

• Martin Aspeli

• Jian Aijun

• Wichert Akkerman

• Jonas Baumann

• David Brenneman

• Joel Burton

• Vincent Fretin

• Rok Garbas

• Anthony Gerrard

• Nathan van Gheem

• David Glick

• Craig Haynal

• Wouter Vanden Hove

• Jean-Michel Francois

• Jim Fulton

• Jamie Lentin

• Alex Limi

• Steve McMahon

• Jason Mehring

• Alec Mitchell

• Daniel Nouri

• Ross Patterson

• Maurits van Rees

• Lennart Regebro

• Laurence Rowe

• Israel Saeta Perez

• Hanno Schlichting

• Christian Schneider

• Carsten Senger

• Jon Stahl

• Eric Steele

• Gaudenz Steinlin

• Dorneles Tremea

• Sean Upton

• Sylvain Viollon

• Matthew Wilkes

• Matt Yoder

• Andi Zeidler

• Hector Velarde

• Giacomo Spettoli

(Please add your name if we have neglected to.)

Release Notes

Dexterity 2.0 is a major release of Dexterity. It has focused on getting Dexterity included in Plone core, by cleaning things up and making dependencies that are not ready for primetime optional.

Grok-style configuration no longer included by default

Dexterity 1.0 included five.grok to allow configuring components via Python directives rather than in separate XML-based ZCML files. It also included two packages, plone.directives.form and plone.directives.dexterity, to provide some grok-style directives for Dexterity-specific features.

The Dexterity authors still like grok and believe it makes it easier to learn how to customize Plone. However, it has been turned into an optional feature so that Dexterity has a chance to enter Plone core even if the Plone framework team doesn’t want to add grok to the already complex stack.

To include these three grok-related packages when you install Dexterity, enable the “grok” extra:

[instance]
eggs =
    plone.app.dexterity [grok]

By the way, a number of schema directives from plone.directives.form that used to require grok to work have been reimplemented so that they work without grok. In particular, the Schema class and the model, fieldset, and primary directives were moved to plone.supermodel.model. The omitted, no_omit, mode, widget, order_before, order_after, read_permission, and write_permission directives were moved to plone.autoform.directives. There are aliases in the old locations so you don’t need to update existing code, but you can switch to the new locations if you’re trying to avoid depending on grok.

Relation support no longer included by default

Dexterity 1.0 included support for object relations based on the zc.relation catalog and plone.app.relationfield, as well as a behavior (plone.app.dexterity.behaviors.related.IRelatedItems) providing a generic list of related items based on that implementation.

Since this feature was added to Dexterity, we discovered that it will be hard to support this type of relation well in Zope 2 until Zope 2 is setting __parent__ pointers everywhere. In addition, we encountered some problems with using interfaces as keys in the zc.relation catalog. And Dexterity gained support for the Archetypes reference engine in plone.app.referenceablebehavior. As a result of these factors, the zc.relation approach to object relationships will not be included in Dexterity or Plone core for the time being.

VERY IMPORTANT: If you are upgrading a site with Dexterity 1.0 to Dexterity 2.0, it will break unless you install plone.app.relationfield, since your database contains persistent intid and relations utilities. The easiest way to include plone.app.relationfield is to install plone.app.dexterity with the “relations” extra:

[instance]
eggs =
    plone.app.dexterity [relations]

Using relations via plone.app.relationfield

If you were relying on the support for relations, you can re-enable support by installing the plone.app.relationfield package. You need to add it to your package’s install_requires in setup.py:

install_requires=[
    'plone.app.relationfield',
    ]

Make sure your package is including its ZCML in configure.zcml:

<include package="plone.app.relationfield" />

And install its GenericSetup profile as a dependency in your package’s metadata.xml:

<dependencies>
  <dependency>profile-plone.app.relationfield:default</dependency>
</dependencies>

If you have any content types using the IRelatedItems behavior, you should update them to import the behavior from the new location:

<property name="behaviors">
    <element value="plone.app.relationfield.behavior.IRelatedItems" />
</property>

Content tree and Autocomplete widgets no longer included by default

In Dexterity 1.0, the widgets in plone.formwidget.autocomplete and plone.formwidget.contenttree were installed as dependencies of plone.app.dexterity. In Dexterity 2.0 they are no longer installed by default, because they are not used by any of the included behaviors or made available via the through-the-web content type editor at this time.

If you use these widgets, make sure your package lists them as dependencies in setup.py, loads their ZCML in configure.zcml, and activates their GenericSetup profiles as dependencies in metadata.xml.

Changelog

2.0.19 (2017-08-14)

Bug fixes:

• Update Dutch translations by merging them from Plone 5.1’s locales. [fredvd]

2.0.18 (2016-05-10)

Fixes:

• Fixed constraints multiple acquisition (cherry picked from master). [cekk]

2.0.17 (2015-10-28)

Fixes:

• Avoid re-adding the UUID on an upgrade step. [gforcada]

2.0.16 (2015-09-28)

• reimport splitSchemaName from plone.dexterity.utils to be compatible with plone.dexterity 2.2.4 [vincentfretin]

2.0.15 (2015-08-14)

• Avoid DeprecationWarning for getIcon. [maurits]

• Remove superfluous for in behaviors zcml w/o factory. No more warnings logged by plone.behavior. See also plone/plone.behavior#2. [jensens]

2.0.14 (2015-07-30)

• Fixed test: use autologin. [gotcha]

2.0.13 (2015-04-23)

• Explicitly include collective.z3cform.datetimewidget - it doesn’t contain an autocomplete entry point. [thet]

• Fix the IDexterityContainer view to make use of plone.app.contenttype’s new listing view. Accessing it’s macro needs the macro-caller’s view variable set to the new listing view. [thet]

2.0.12 (2014-09-07)

Brown bag release, please do not pin this version, use either 2.0.11, 2.0.13 or any later version.

• Don’t throw an error if allowed_content_types is none or missing. Fix https://github.com/plone/plone.app.contenttypes/issues/91 [pbauer]

• PLIP #13705: Remove <base> tag. [frapell]

2.0.11 (2013-12-07)

• Fixed Add view URL of cloned content type. Refs http://dev.plone.org/ticket/13776. [thomasdesvenain]

• Add robot testing environment and first robot test. [cedricmessiant]

• Better string normalization when setting type id from type title (change accented or special characters with corresponding letters). [cedricmessiant]

• Show a warning when editing the default page of a folder. [davisagli]

2.0.10 (2013-09-16)

• Fix determination of allowed types so it checks permission in the context of the original folder when inheriting allowed types. [davisagli]

2.0.9 (2013-08-13)

• Add documentation for defaultFactory tag in XML ref. [smcmahon]

• Removed line breaks within documentation URLs in modeleditor.py. [smcmahon]

• Fixed XML export so that GenericSetup’s parser can successfully parse it later on at install time. [zupo]

• Use @@ploneform-render-widget to render widgets in display mode. [cedricmessiant]

• Call the IBasic description field ‘Summary’ and give it help text that is actually helpful. [davisagli]

• Don’t show the ‘Allow Discussion’ field on an item’s default view. [davisagli]

2.0.8 (2013-05-23)

• Add XML Model Editor based on plone.resourceditor. If plone.resourceditor is available, this is exposed by an “Edit XML Field Model” button on the fields tab of a content type – if the content type is editable TTW. [smcmahon]

• Added catalan translations [sneridagh]

2.0.7 (2013-04-09)

• Fix bug in determining whether to show the allowed contained type fields. [ericof]

• Let the behavior INameFromFileName also set the title from the filename if the type has such a field and it is left empty. [pbauer]

• Updated french translations. [thomasdesvenain]

2.0.6 (2013-04-06)

• Add missing translation strings. [vincentfretin]

2.0.5 (2013-04-06)

• Updated pt_BR translation [ericof]

2.0.4 (2013-03-05)

• Add zh_TW translation [TsungWei Hu]

• Add support for constraining container allowed content types using the “Restrictions” form in the add menu. Merged from Patrick Gerken’s (@do3cc) work in plone.app.contenttypes. [rpatterson]

• When a new type is added, redirect to the fields tab as the next view. [davisagli]

• Don’t show the short name as a field on the type overview page. [davisagli]

• Remove the ‘Container’ checkbox when adding a new type, and default to creating a container. [davisagli]

• Tweaks to type control panel based on user testing. [davisagli]

• Set default language for a new content item based on the language of its container. [frapell]

• Fixed i18n of “Contents” in folder default view. [vincentfretin]

• Added Ukrainian translations [kroman0]

2.0.3 (2013-01-17)

• Nothing changed yet.

2.0.2 (2013-01-01)

• Added French translations [cedricmessiant]

• The behavior controlpanel now correctly invalidates any modified FTIs. [malthe]

• I18n improved by adding many missing strings [giacomos]

• better graphical integration in the control panel [giacomos]

• Allow discussion behavior added. [timo]

2.0.1 (2012-08-31)

• Update MANIFEST.in to correct packaging error. [esteele]

2.0 (2012-08-30)

• DC metadata fields are now correctly encoded and decoded (from byte strings to unicode and vice versa). Currently, UTF-8 is assumed. [malthe]

• Use lxml instead of elementtree. [davisagli]

• Use ViewPageTemplateFile from zope.browserpage. [hannosch]

• Add upgrade step to make sure that only uninstalling plone.app.intid will remove the intids utility. [davisagli]

• Fix traversal over the types context so that skin items used by widgets can be acquired. [davisagli]

• Provide an additionalSchemata property on the schema context so the schema editor can include a preview of fields from behaviors. [davisagli]

• Give a more explicit warning before deleting content types that have existing instances. [davisagli]

• Add validation to prevent giving a type the same name as an existing type. [davisagli]

• Make sure the title and description of new FTIs are stored encoded, and with a default i18n domain of ‘plone’. [davisagli]

• Add overview tab for each type in the control panel. [davisagli]

• Added Sphinx source for the Dexterity Developer manual. [giacomos]

• Added Italian translation. [giacomos]

• Internationalized content type settings pages, I18N fixes, messages extraction, French translations. [thomasdesvenain]

• Added Spanish translation. [hvelarde]

• Install the profile from collective.z3cform.datetimewidget to enable the Jquery Tools date picker for date/time fields. [davisagli]

• Bugfix: Make sure type short names are validated. [davisagli]

• Bugfix: Fix display of type descriptions in the types control panel. [davisagli]

• Bugfix: Make sure subject can still be retrieved as unicode for the categorization behavior now that the Subject accessor returns a bytestring. [davisagli]

• Add intro message to Dexterity control panel. [jonstahl, davisagli]

• Grok support is now an optional “grok” extra. Use this if you want five.grok, plone.directives.form, and plone.directives.dexterity. See the release notes for more information. The behaviors in this package were updated to work without using grok. [davisagli]

• plone.formwidget.autocomplete and plone.formwidget.contenttree are no longer included by default. See the release notes for more information. [davisagli]

• Moved the ‘Related Items’ behavior to plone.app.relationfield. plone.app.relationfield is no longer installed as a dependency. See the release notes for more information including how to update your package if it depends on relation support or the ‘Related Items’ behavior. IMPORTANT: You must install plone.app.relationfield on sites that are being upgraded from Dexterity 1.0 to Dexterity 2.0, or the site will break. [davisagli]

• Converted tests to plone.app.testing-based setup. The old PloneTestCase-based test case classes and layer are now deprecated. [davisagli]

• Remove ++resource++plone.app.dexterity.overlays.css from the CSS registry. [davisagli]

• Removed support for Plone 3 / CMF 2.1 / Zope 2.10. [davisagli]

• Update dependencies and imports as appropriate for Zope 2.12 & Zope 2.13 [davisagli]

• Remove CDATA section from “browsertypes_listing.pt” (in HTML5: allowed only in SVG/MathML namespaces). [kleist]

1.0 - 2011-05-20

• Fix publishing dates DateTime/datetime conversions so as not to drift by the timezone delta every save. [elro]

• Make sure cloned types get a new factory. [davisagli]

• Don’t override overlay CSS in Plone 4. [davisagli]

• Fixed cloning of types with a period (.) in their short name. [davisagli]

• Allow specifying a type’s short name when adding a type. [davisagli]

• Make sure the Basic metadata adapter accesses the content’s title attribute directly so it doesn’t get encoded. Also make sure encoded data can’t be set via this adapter. [davisagli]

1.0rc1 - 2011-04-30

• Added upgrade step to install new javascript from plone.formwidget.autocomplete [davisagli]

• Added basic support for making TTW changes to schemas defined in filesystem models and code. (Note: This feature will not actually work until some further changes are completed in plone.dexterity.)

  In order to support this change, the event handling to serialize schema changes was revised. We now register a single event handler for the SchemaModifiedEvent raised for the schema context. This allows us to keep track of the FTI that changes need to be serialized to on the schema context. The serializeSchemaOnFieldEvent and serializeSchemaOnSchemaEvent handlers were removed from the serialize module and replaced by serializeSchemaContext. The serializeSchema helper remains but is deprecated. [davisagli]

• Add MANIFEST.in. [WouterVH]

• Add “export” button to types editor. Exports GS-style zip archive of type info for selected types. [stevem]

• Fix old jquery alias in types_listing.pt. This closes http://code.google.com/p/dexterity/issues/detail?id=159 [davisagli]

• Make display templates fill content-core on Plone 4. [elro]

• Add ids to the group fieldsets on display forms. [elro]

• Exclude from navigation behavior should be restricted to IDexterityContent. [elro]

1.0b4 - 2011-03-15

• Add a “Name from file name” behavior. [elro]

• Remove the NameFromTitle behavior factory, it is not necessary. [elro]

• Add “Next previous navigation” and “Next previous navigation toggle” behaviors. [elro]

• Add an “Exclude from navigation” behavior. [lentinj]

• Put the folder listing within a fieldset. [lentinj]

1.0b3 - 2011-02-11

• Add a navigation root behavior. [elro]

• Fix decoding error when an encoded description is stored in the FTI. [davisagli]

• Avoid empty <div class=”field”> tag for title and description in item.pt and container.pt. [gaudenzius]

• Add locales structure for translations with cs , de, es, eu, fr, ja, nl, pt_BR [toutpt]

• Update french translation [toutpt]

1.0b2 - 2010-08-05

• Fix several XML errors in templates. Needed for Chameleon compatibility. [wichert]

• cloning a type through the dexterity UI in the control panel did not work if the type had a hyphen in it’s name. This fixes http://code.google.com/p/dexterity/issues/detail?id=126 [vangheem]

1.0b1 - 2010-04-20

• Require plone.app.jquerytools for the schema editor UI, and make sure it is installed when upgrading. [davisagli]

• Remove unused schemaeditor.css. [davisagli]

• Omit the metadata fields except on edit and add forms. [davisagli]

• Enable the “Name from title” behavior for new types, by default. [davisagli]

• Include plone.formwidget.namedfile so that File upload and Image fields are available out of the box. You must explicitly include z3c.blobfile in your environment if you want blob-based files. [davisagli]

• Added a DexterityLayer that can be used in tests. [davisagli]

• Fix issue with the BehaviorsForm accidentally polluting the title of the z3c.form EditForm ‘Apply’ button. [davisagli]

• Add upgrades folder and make sure plone.app.z3cform profile gets installed on upgrades from previous versions of Dexterity. [davisagli]

• Depend on the plone.app.z3cform profile, to make sure the Plone browser layer for z3c.form gets installed. [davisagli]

• Avoid relying on acquisition to get the portal_url for links in the type listing table. [davisagli]

1.0a7 - 2010-01-08

• Make sure the Dublin Core fieldsets appear in the same order as they do in AT content. [davisagli]

• Make sure the current user is loaded as the default creator for the IOwnership schema in an add form. [davisagli]

• Include behavior descriptions on the behavior edit tab. [davisagli]

• IBasic behavior: set missing_value of description-field to u’’ . The description should never be None (live_search would not work any more). [jbaumann]

• Fix issue where traversing to a nonexistent type name in the types control panel did not raise NotFound. [davisagli]

• Make it possible to view the fields of non-editable schemata. [davisagli]

• Tweaks to the tabbed_forms template used for the types control panel. [davisagli]

1.0a6 - 2009-10-12

• Add plone.app.textfield as a dependency. We don’t use it directly in this package, but users of Dexterity should have it installed and available. [optilude]

• Use some default icons for new types. [davisagli]

• Show type icons in type listing if available. [davisagli]

• Removed ‘container’ field from the types listing in the control panel (it wasn’t working). [davisagli]

• Add message factories to titles and descriptions of metadata schema fields. Fixes http://code.google.com/p/dexterity/issues/detail?id=75. [optilude]

• Patch listActionInfos() instead of listActions() in order to get the folder/add category into the actions list. This avoids a problem with the ‘actions.xml’ export handler exporting the folder/add category incorrectly. Fixes http://code.google.com/p/dexterity/issues/detail?id=78 [optilude]

1.0a5 - 2009-07-26

• Explicitly include overrides.zcml from plone.app.z3cform. [optilude]

1.0a4 - 2009-07-12

• Changed API methods and arguments to mixedCase to be more consistent with the rest of Zope. This is a non-backwards-compatible change. Our profuse apologies, but it’s now or never. :-/

  If you find that you get import errors or unknown keyword arguments in your code, please change names from foo_bar too fooBar, e.g. serialize_schema() becomes serializeSchema(). [optilude]

1.0a3 - 2009-06-07

• Updated use of <plone:behavior /> directive to match plone.behavior 1.0b4. [optilude]

1.0a2 - 2009-06-01

• Remove superfluous <includeOverrides /> in configure.zcml which would cause a problem when the package is loaded via z3c.autoinclude.plugin [optilude]

1.0a1 - 2009-05-27

• Initial release