[Product-Developers] plone.app.layout ViewletBase and portal_url

[Wichert Akkerman]

I'm debugging some code that broke in a very unexpected way:

(Pdb) p getToolByName(self, 'portal_url')
'http://localhost:8080/Plone'

That should return a tool, not a string. This turned out to be caused by 
plone.app.layout.viewlets.common.ViewletBase.update which sets 
self.portal_url to the portal URL. This looks harmless, but due to 
acquisition this will break patterns like this:

class MyViewlet(ViewletBase):
   def update(self):
      super(MyViewlet, self).update()
      self.mt=getToolByName(self.context, "portal_membership")
      self.somemethod()

   def somemethod(self):
      return self.mt.ToolMethod()

the problem here is that in somemethod() self.mt gets acquisition wrapped in 
the viewlet, so when ToolMethod does getToolByName(self, "portal_url") it
finds the portal_url variable ViewletBase.update set on the viewlet instead
of the tool.

I would like to rename that variable in ViewletBase to prevent this problem 
but I do not have a good overview of how many people are relying on that 
specific variable to be set. If you are relying on this please let me know 
ASAP. If I here no objection I intend to rename the variable for the 
upcoming Plone 3.1 alpha release.

Wichert.


-- 
Wichert Akkerman <wichert at wiggy.net>    It is simple to make things.
http://www.wiggy.net/                   It is hard to make things simple.