Overview

This package is at present not reusable without depending on a large chunk of the Zope Toolkit and its assumptions. It is maintained by the Zope Toolkit project.

This package provides an implementation of browser resources. It also provides directives for defining those resources using ZCML.

Resources are static files and directories that are served to the browser directly from the filesystem. The most common example are images, CSS style sheets, or JavaScript files.

Resources are be registered under a symbolic name and can later be referred to by that name, so their usage is independent from their physical location.

You can register a single file with the <browser:resource> directive, and a whole directory with the <browser:resourceDirectory> directive, for example

<browser:resource
file="/path/to/static.file" name="myfile" />
<browser:resourceDirectory
directory="/path/to/images" name="main-images" />

This causes a named adapter to be registered that adapts the request to zope.interface.Interface (XXX why do we not use an explicit interface?), so to later retrieve a resource, use zope.component.getAdapter(request, name='myfile').

There are two ways to traverse to a resource,

  1. with the 'empty' view on a site, e. g. http://localhost/@@/myfile (This is declared by zope.browserresource)
  2. with the ++resource++ namespace, e. g. http://localhost/++resource++myfile (This is declared by zope.traversing.namespace)

In case of resource-directories traversal simply continues through its contents, e. g. http://localhost/@@/main-images/subdir/sample.jpg

Rather than putting together the URL to a resource manually, you should use zope.traversing.browser.interfaces.IAbsoluteURL to get the URL, or for a shorthand, call the resource object. This has an additional benefit:

If you want to serve resources from a different URL, for example because you want to use a web server specialized in serving static files instead of the appserver, you can register an IAbsoluteURL adapter for the site under the name 'resource' that will be used to compute the base URLs for resources.

For example, if you register 'http://static.example.com/' as the base 'resource' URL, the resources from the above example would yield the following absolute URLs: http://static.example.com/@@/myfile and http://static.example.com/@@/main-images

CHANGES

3.12.1 (unreleased)

3.12.0 (2010-12-14)

  • Added zcml extra dependencies and fixed dependencies of configure.zcml on other packages' meta.zcml.
  • Added a test for including our own configure.zcml.

3.11.0 (2010-08-13)

  • Support the HTTP ETag header for file resources. ETag generation can be customized or disabled by providing an IETag multi-adapter on (IFileResource, your-application-skin).

3.10.3 (2010-04-30)

  • Prefer the standard libraries doctest module to the one from zope.testing.

3.10.2 (2009-11-25)

  • The previous release had a broken egg, sorry.

3.10.1 (2009-11-24)

  • Import hooks functionality from zope.component after it was moved there from zope.site. This lifts the dependency on zope.site and thereby, ZODB.
  • Import ISite and IPossibleSite from zope.component after they were moved there from zope.location.

3.10.0 (2009-09-25)

  • Add an ability to forbid publishing of some files in the resource directory, this is done by fnmatch'ing the wildcards in the forbidden_names``class attribute of ``DirectoryResource. By default, the .svn is in that attribute, so directories won't publish subversion system directory that can contain private information.

3.9.0 (2009-08-27)

Initial release. This package was splitted off zope.app.publisher as a part of refactoring process.

Additional changes that are made during refactoring:

  • Resource class for file resources are now selected the pluggable way. The resource directory publisher and browser:resource ZCML directive now creating file resources using factory utility lookup based on the file extension, so it's now possible to add new resource types without introducing new ZCML directives and they will work inside resource directories as well.

    NOTE: the "resource_factories" attribute from the DirectoryResource was removed, so if you were using this attribute for changing resource classes for some file extensions, you need to migrate your code to new utility-based mechanism.

    See zope.browserresource.interfaces.IResourceFactoryFactory interface.

  • The Image resource class was removed, as they are actually simple files. To migrate, simply rename the "image" argument in browser:resource and browser:i18n-resource directives to "file", if you don't do this, resouces will work, but you'll get deprecation warnings.

    If you need custom behaviour for images, you can register a resource factory utility for needed file extensions.

  • The PageTemplateResource was moved into a separate package, "zope.ptresource", which is a plugin for this package now. Because of that, the "template" argument of browser:resource directive was deprecated and you should rename it to "file" to migrate. The PageTemplateResource will be created for "pt", "zpt" and "html" files automatically, if zope.ptresource package is included in your configuration.

  • Fix stripping the "I" from an interface name for icon title, if no title is specified.

  • When publishing a resource via Resources view, set resource parent to an ISite object, not to current site manager.

  • Clean up code and improve test coverage.