ListMate Version 0.9

Manual

Author: Heiko Stoermer, innominate AG Germany, <[email protected]>

Date: 2000-04-11

Version: 0.9 stable

[The author's new home]

Creating a ListMate Instance

After successful installation of both the ListMate and ListMateContainer Products, choose ListMate from the list of Products in your management screen and press the Add button.

In the form, enter a name for your table object and press the Add button. (The name is really a Zope id, so it may not contain whitespace).

Several things happen now:

a ListMate instance with the id you entered is created in the current folder
within the Instance, a UserFolder is created (acl_users)
the user "admin" is added in acl_users, it is granted manager privileges for the ListMage instance
a random password for the admin user is processed

IMPORTANT:

If you created the ListMate in your personal folder, you do not have to worry about the admin account. However, if you created a table in a ListMateContainer (see below) you can only modify it with the random password you see. It is only presented to you once !

Now click the Proceed button. It will lead you to the table wizard.

The TableWizard

In the TableWizard you can add columns to your table. Currently supported column types are Simple String and Text. (Boolean and Numeric values will follow in later releases). Simple String is for one-liners, Text will offer you a textarea for input.

Type a column name into the New Column field, choose the appropriate type and press Add.

You will see the newly created column appear.

If you create columns for - say - a small address table, it might look like this:

If you're done with table definition, you can click the Finish button. It will lead you to the "public" table view (its index_html method).

As you have by now only defined the table, it is of course empty.

Entering Data

To enter data, click the New Entry button in the table's public view.

You will see a data entry form similar to Zope's property sheets. Enter data for the item and click the Save Changes button. Now the entered data is saved with the object and you will be led to the item's public view. There you can click the Main link at the top to get to the table's public view. After adding several people, it might look like this:

As you see, you can view item details via the View link or mark and delete entries.

IMPORTANT: deleting an entry also deletes the associated files (see below). So be careful. Fortunately, we're using Zope, which allows us to undo many things. Puh, thanks Zope! ;-)

IMPORTANT: after having created the table, use the Edit Table button with caution. Especially deleting columns from the table might make it look broken. Generally speaking: changes to the table structure currently only apply to entries that are created after the change.

Uploading Files

One special feature of ListMate is the ability to store files with your entries. This might be interesting for project overview where you can store PDFs of your offer with the project, or you can upload scanned menues of delivery services. Whatever you like.

To store files with your entries, click the View link in the table's public view, then click the Modify button in the detail view. In the lower part of the following screen you can see a file input field. If you have a description for the file, enter it in the Description field. Then choose the file with the dialog and click the Save button.

The file is then uploaded and associated to your entry.

You can do this as often as Zope allows you to. ;-)

Using ListMateContainer

Especially in Intranets, it's often useful to provide users with an area (a folder) where they can create their own lists and tables and administer them themselves. ListMate and ListMateContainer offer you such a framework.

Simply create a ListMateContainer instance in the desired location of your zope tree. The newly created instance can be called by anyone in your network and anyone is allowed to create a ListMate instance in the container (detail: the _add method has proxy role "manager").

The container's public view presents you a list of all contained ListMate tables.