Standard ZConfig Schema Components

ZConfig provides a few convenient schema components as part of the package. These may be used directly or can serve as examples for creating new components.

ZConfig.components.basic

The ZConfig.components.basic package provides small components that can be helpful in composing application-specific components and schema. There is no large functionality represented by this package. The default component provided by this package simply imports all of the smaller components. This can be imported using:

<import package="ZConfig.components.basic"/>

Each of the smaller components is documented directly; importing these selectively can reduce the time it takes to load a schema slightly, and allows replacing the other basic components with alternate components (by using different imports that define the same type names) if desired.

The Mapping Section Type

There is a basic section type that behaves like a simple Python mapping; this can be imported directly using:

<import package="ZConfig.components.basic" file="mapping.xml"/>

This defines a single section type, ZConfig.basic.mapping. When this is used, the section value is a Python dictionary mapping keys to string values.

This type is intended to be used by extending it in simple ways. The simplest is to create a new section type name that makes more sense for the application:

<import package="ZConfig.components.basic" file="mapping.xml"/>

<sectiontype name="my-mapping"
             extends="ZConfig.basic.mapping"
             />

<section name="*"
         type="my-mapping"
         attribute="map"
         />

This allows a configuration to contain a mapping from basic-key names to string values like this:

<my-mapping>
  This that
  and the other
</my-mapping>

The value of the configuration object’s map attribute would then be the dictionary:

{'this': 'that',
 'and': 'the other',
 }

(Recall that the basic-key data type converts everything to lower case.)

Perhaps a more interesting application of ZConfig.basic.mapping is using the derived type to override the keytype . If we have the conversion function:

def email_address(value):
    userid, hostname = value.split("@", 1)
    hostname = hostname.lower()  # normalize what we know we can
    return "%s@%s" % (userid, hostname)

then we can use this as the key type for a derived mapping type:

<import package="ZConfig.components.basic" file="mapping.xml"/>

<sectiontype name="email-users"
             extends="ZConfig.basic.mapping"
             keytype="mypkg.datatypes.email_address"
             />

<section name="*"
         type="email-users"
         attribute="email_users"
         />