A nice ‘gotcha’ is the distinction between Zope’s schema.Date and schema.Datetime. The difference is obvious and straightforward when the two terms are laid out side-by-side: one is for dates only and the other adds a time component. Where things fell down for me in my usage of these fields with a Dexterity-based content type in Plone is the human component. When these fields are mashed in together within a lot of other text/Python/names, it’s easy to miss those 4 little letters of ‘time’. This lead me trying to use a DatetimeFieldWidget when I really could only use a DateFieldWidget. Wrong widget for the wrong type = unpredictable. (more…)

It’s a little bit of a different mash-up, but it’s still nonetheless useful to have, given types of booking forms and so forth that could utilise it.  The easiest way I found (to avoid security issues with Python scripts in Plone) was to create an external method and just import it within a PFG Custom Adapter.

Parts

• My GoogleCalendar.py external method.  I’ve had to add this into a policy product I have.  The function should be generalised enough to work with any Google account, hosted or not.  In short:
  • It takes in a variety of arguments (email, password, calendar_url, start_time, end_time, title, location, content).
    • Email/password are your auth details
    • calendar_url is where you’re putting the event,
    • and the rest of the args are related to the event itself.
  • It builds the XML-based request to create the event.  I tried going for the gdata API, but it’s just over the top for a simple exercise like this.
  • Send the request to Google (twice, as required), and create the event in the process.
• A custom PFG script adapter like this:

  from DateTime import DateTime
  from my.theme.Extensions.GoogleCalendar import createGoogleCalendarEvent
  calendar_url = 'http://www.google.com/...'
  email = 'myu...@google.com'
  password = 'shhhhhsecret'
  startDateTime = (DateTime(str(fields['start-date-time']))).HTML4()
  endDateTime = (DateTime(str(fields['end-date-time']))).HTML4()
  eventTitle = str(fields['purpose'])
  eventLocation = str(fields['rooms-to-book'])
  eventContent = 'Booked for:  '+ str(fields['booking-name'])
  createGoogleCalendarEvent(context, email, password, calendar_url, startDateTime, endDateTime, eventTitle, eventLocation, eventContent)
  

And that should be that.  As long as all your URLs, emails, passwords, and fields in your form are suitable, this should work a treat.  Note that the start-date-time and end-date-time fields are date/time fields in your Form Folder and converting to HTML4() makes them into Google’s format.  Additional info can be added in the eventContent variable, and that’ll turn up in the Description in Google Calendar.

For added spice…

Just add a web interface to your Google Calendar to your Plone site (eg in a normal Plone page; watch out for iframe filtering) and let people book themselves into things.  Would be great to see PFG know when a Google Calendar event was on (and stop people submitting) but it’s a bit much just for now.

So, for today’s problem, how can we get a URL (specifically the GET request arguments) suitably encoded? Easy, if we’re talking about a Python script that lives on the file system and can be used within Zope/Plone that way. But what about some sort of Python script that has to exist on the Plone site (specifically, creating a PloneFormGen (PFG) Custom Adapter)? (more…)