Vocabularies

Creating your own static and dynamic vocabularies

Vocabularies are normally used in conjunction with selection fields, and are supported by the zope.schema package, with widgets provided by z3c.form.

Selection fields use the Choice field type. To allow the user to select a single value, use a Choice field directly:

class IMySchema(model.Schema):
    myChoice = schema.Choice(...)

For a multi-select field, use a List, Tuple, Set or Frozenset with a Choice as the value_type:

class IMySchema(model.Schema):
    myList = schema.List(..., value_type=schema.Choice(...))

The choice field must be passed one of the following arguments:

• values can be used to give a list of static values;
• source can be used to refer to an IContextSourceBinder or ISource instance;
• vocabulary can be used to refer to an IVocabulary instance or (more commonly) a string giving the name of an IVocabularyFactory named utility.

In the remainder of this section, we will show the various techniques for defining vocabularies through several iterations of a new field added to the Program type allowing the user to pick the organiser responsible for the program.

Static vocabularies

Our first attempt uses a static list of organisers. We use the message factory to allow the labels (term titles) to be translated. The values stored in the organizer field will be a unicode object representing the chosen label, or None if no value is selected:

from zope.schema.vocabulary import SimpleVocabulary, SimpleTerm

organizers = SimpleVocabulary(
    [SimpleTerm(value=u'Bill', title=_(u'Bill')),
     SimpleTerm(value=u'Bob', title=_(u'Bob')),
     SimpleTerm(value=u'Jim', title=_(u'Jim'))]
    )

organizer = schema.Choice(
            title=_(u"Organiser"),
            vocabulary=organizers,
            required=False,
        )

Since required is False, there will be a no value option in the drop-down list.

Dynamic sources

The static vocabulary is obviously a bit limited, since it is hard-coded in Python.

We can make a one-off dynamic vocabulary using a context source binder. This is simply a callable (usually a function or an object with a __call__ method) that provides the IContextSourceBinder interface and takes a context parameter. The context argument is the context of the form (i.e. the folder on an add form, and the content object on an edit form). The callable should return a vocabulary, which is most easily achieved by using the SimpleVocabulary class from zope.schema.

Here is an example using a function to return all users in a particular group:

from zope.schema.interfaces import IContextSourceBinder
from zope.schema.vocabulary import SimpleVocabulary
from Products.CMFCore.utils import getToolByName
from zope.interface import directlyProvides


def possibleOrganizers(context):
    acl_users = getToolByName(context, 'acl_users')
    group = acl_users.getGroupById('organizers')
    terms = []

    if group is not None:
        for member_id in group.getMemberIds():
            user = acl_users.getUserById(member_id)
            if user is not None:
                member_name = user.getProperty('fullname') or member_id
                terms.append(SimpleVocabulary.createTerm(member_id, str(member_id), member_name))

    return SimpleVocabulary(terms)
directlyProvides(possibleOrganizers, IContextSourceBinder)

We use the PAS API to get the group and its members, building a list, which we then turn into a vocabulary.

When working with vocabularies, you’ll come across some terminology that is worth explaining:

• A term is an entry in the vocabulary. The term has a value. Most terms are tokenised terms which also have a token, and some terms are titled, meaning they have a title that is different to the token.
• The token must be an ASCII string. It is the value passed with the request when the form is submitted. A token must uniquely identify a term.
• The value is the actual value stored on the object. This is not passed to the browser or used in the form. The value is often a unicode object, but can be any type of object.
• The title is a unicode object or translatable message. It is used in the form.

The SimpleVocabulary class contains two class methods that can be used to create vocabularies from lists:

fromValues()

takes a simple list of values and returns a tokenised vocabulary where the values are the items in the list, and the tokens are created by calling str() on the values.

fromItems()

takes a list of (token, value) tuples and creates a tokenised vocabulary with the token and value specified.

You can also instantiate a SimpleVocabulary yourself and pass a list of terms in the initialiser. The createTerm() class method can be used to create a term from a value, token and title. Only the value is required.

In the example above, we have chosen to create a SimpleVocabulary from terms with the user id used as value and token, and the user’s full name as a title.

To use this context source binder, we use the source argument to the Choice constructor:

organizer = schema.Choice(
    title=_(u"Organiser"),
    source=possibleOrganizers,
    required=False,
)

Parameterised sources

We can improve this example by moving the group name out of the function, allowing it to be set on a per-field basis. To do so, we turn our IContextSourceBinder into a class that is initialised with the group name:

from zope.interface import implements

class GroupMembers(object):
    """Context source binder to provide a vocabulary of users in a given
    group.
    """

    implements(IContextSourceBinder)

    def __init__(self, group_name):
        self.group_name = group_name

    def __call__(self, context):
        acl_users = getToolByName(context, 'acl_users')
        group = acl_users.getGroupById(self.group_name)
        terms = []

        if group is not None:
            for member_id in group.getMemberIds():
                user = acl_users.getUserById(member_id)
                if user is not None:
                    member_name = user.getProperty('fullname') or member_id
                    terms.append(SimpleVocabulary.createTerm(member_id, str(member_id), member_name))

        return SimpleVocabulary(terms)

Again, the source is set using the source argument to the Choice constructor:

organizer = schema.Choice(
    title=_(u"Organiser"),
    source=GroupMembers('organizers'),
    required=False,
)

When the schema is initialised on startup, a GroupMembers object is instantiated, storing the desired group name. Each time the vocabulary is needed, this object will be called (i.e. the __call__() method is invoked) with the context as an argument, expected to return an appropriate vocabulary.

Named vocabularies

Context source binders are great for simple dynamic vocabularies. They are also re-usable, since you can import the source from a single location and use it in multiple instances.

Sometimes, however, we want to provide an additional level of decoupling, by using named vocabularies. These are similar to context source binders, but are components registered as named utilities, referenced in the schema by name only. This allows local overrides of the vocabulary via the Component Architecture, and makes it easier to distribute vocabularies in third party packages.

Note

Named vocabularies cannot be parameterised in the way as we did with the GroupMembers context source binder, since they are looked up by name only.

We can turn our first "members in the organizers group" vocabulary into a named vocabulary by creating a named utility providing IVocabularyFactory. Add to your configure.zcml:

<utility
    name="example.conference.Organisers"
    provides="zope.schema.interfaces.IVocabularyFactory"
    component="example.conference.vocabularies.OrganizersVocabularyFactory"
/>

By convention, the vocabulary name is prefixed with the package name, to
ensure uniqueness.

Note

Then create a vocabulary factory in vocabularies.py:

...

class OrganizersVocabularyFactory(object):

    def __call__(self, context):
        acl_users = getToolByName(context, 'acl_users')
        group = acl_users.getGroupById('organizers')
        terms = []

        if group is not None:
            for member_id in group.getMemberIds():
                user = acl_users.getUserById(member_id)
                if user is not None:
                    member_name = user.getProperty('fullname') or member_id
                    terms.append(SimpleVocabulary.createTerm(member_id, str(member_id), member_name))

        return SimpleVocabulary(terms)

We can make use of this vocabulary in any schema by passing its name to the vocabulary argument of the Choice field constructor:

organizer = schema.Choice(
    title=_(u"Organiser"),
    vocabulary=u"example.conference.Organizers",
    required=False,
)

Some common vocabularies

As you might expect, there are a number of standard vocabularies that come with Plone. These are found in the plone.app.vocabularies package. Some of the more useful ones include:

plone.app.vocabularies.AvailableContentLanguages

a list of all available content languages;

plone.app.vocabularies.SupportedContentLanguages

a list of currently supported content languages;

plone.app.vocabularies.Roles

the user roles available in the site;

plone.app.vocabularies.PortalTypes

a list of types installed in portal_types;

plone.app.vocabularies.ReallyUserFriendlyTypes

a list of those types that are likely to mean something to users;

plone.app.vocabularies.Workflows

a list of workflows;

plone.app.vocabularies.WorkflowStates

a list of all states from all workflows;

plone.app.vocabularies.WorkflowTransitions

a list of all transitions from all workflows.

In addition, the package plone.principalsource provides several vocabularies that are useful for selecting users and groups in a Dexterity context:

plone.principalsource.Users

provides users

plone.principalsource.Groups

provides groups

plone.principalsource.Principals

provides security principals (users or groups)

Importantly, these sources are not iterable, which means that you cannot use them to provide a list of all users in the site. This is intentional: calculating this list can be extremely expensive if you have a large site with many users, especially if you are connecting to LDAP or Active Directory. Instead, you should use a search-based source such as one of these.

We will use one of these together with an auto-complete widget to finalise our organizer field. To do so, we need to add plone.principalsource as a dependency of example.conference. In setup.py, we add:

install_requires=[
      ...
      'plone.principalsource',
  ],

Note

Since we use an <includeDependencies /> line in configure.zcml, we do not need a separate <include /> line in configure.zcml for this new dependency.

The organizer field now looks like:

organizer = schema.Choice(
    title=_(u"Organiser"),
    vocabulary=u"plone.principalsource.Users",
    required=False,
)

The autocomplete selection widget

The organizer field now has a query-based source. The standard selection widget (a drop-down list) is not capable of rendering such a source. Instead, we need to use a more powerful widget. For a basic widget, see z3c.formwidget.query, but in a Plone context, you will more likely want to use plone.formwidget.autocomplete, which extends z3c.formwidget.query to provide friendlier user interface.

The widget is provided with plone.app.dexterity, so we do not need to configure it ourselves. We only need to tell Dexterity to use this widget instead of the default, using a form widget hint as shown earlier. At the top of program.py, we add the following import:

from plone.formwidget.autocomplete import AutocompleteFieldWidget

Note

If we were using a multi-valued field, such as a List with a Choice value_type, we would use the AutocompleteMultiFieldWidget instead.

In the IProgram schema (which, recall, derives from model.Schema and is therefore processed for form hints at startup), we then add the following:

from plone.autoform import directives

directives.widget(organizer=AutocompleteFieldWidget)
organizer = schema.Choice(
    title=_(u"Organiser"),
    vocabulary=u"plone.principalsource.Users",
    required=False,
)

You should now see a dynamic auto-complete widget on the form, so long as you have JavaScript enabled. Start typing a user name and see what happens. The widget also has fall-back for non-JavaScript capable browsers.