Plone, Dexterity, and Incorrect Widgets

// under content type datetime dexterity fields form plone problem product zope

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.

When it’s all laid out like that, things are clear and simple. When the small typo has been made, however, things are far less forgiving and informative. Thankfully, the typo wasn’t my fault, but was caused by a ZopeSkel template for Dexterity (zopeskel.dexterity) so I’m not kicking myself over it. Essentially, the error message (for those of you possibly experiencing something similar) is like this:

2010-06-18 16:32:03 ERROR Zope.SiteErrorLog 1276842723.120.730292360531 http://localhost:8080/test/kss_z3cform_inline_validation/validate_input
    Traceback (innermost last):
    Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 119, in publish
    Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 88, in mapply
    Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 42, in call_object
    Module <wrapper>, line 5, in wrapper
    Module kss.core.actionwrapper, line 238, in apply
    Module plone.app.z3cform.kss.validation, line 48, in validate_input
    Module z3c.form.group, line 92, in extractData
    Module z3c.form.form, line 143, in extractData
    Module z3c.form.field, line 302, in extract
    Module z3c.form.converter, line 164, in toFieldValue
    Module zope.i18n.format, line 79, in parse
    Module sre, line 129, in match
    TypeError: expected string or buffer

And the end result of this is that you can’t validate fields in your Dexterity content Add form (eg the above traceback is echoed whenever you click in/out of a field), nor can you actually save your content. Unfortunately, even if you were to go hunting through the traceback, you’d probably end up like me and find that the code is trying to validate a completely different field than the problematic one. No help whatsoever.

After going through each of the different fields I had on my content type, I figured out the cause. If you’re hitting a similar issue, check your widgets. If you’re using zopeskel.dexterity, don’t worry though. I checked in a fix for this issue this morning, correcting the widget to be used. You’ll need to use the latest version from the Plone Collective SVN to make the templates work correctly.

On the other hand, you could look at collective.z3cform.datepicker, which implements a much more user-friendly Date and DateTime widgets (using jQuery UI etc).

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