My Data I Wanna

This blog is powered by COREBlog, a Zope product. Blog entries are persistent Python objects stored in Zope's ZODB.

Let's say I wish to keep a copy of each entry in a separate file in the local filesystem.

One way is to fetch it through the web:

$ curl -o 1.html http://sandbox.rulemaker.net/ngps/1

This saves blog entry '1' into the file 1.html.

To get the lot:

$ for ((i=1; i<=$last; i++))
do
curl -o $i.html http://sandbox.rulemaker.net/ngps/$i
done
$

Each html file contains the rendered entry, complete with headers, footers and Google ad. More work is needed if I want just the entry body itself, such as parsing the HTML, or crafting a DTML method or Python script within Zope to display just the body.

Another way is to read it from (a copy of) the ZODB. On my desktop, I have a local Zope installed into ~/pkg/zope. First I get my blog entries into this Zope, either by importing from the live Zope, or by copying over the entire ZODB file itself.

Then, invoke Python:

$ python2.1
Python 2.1.3 (#2, Jun 10 2003, 00:24:34) 
[GCC 2.95.4 20020320 [FreeBSD]] on freebsd4
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sys
>>> sys.path.insert(0,'/home/ngps/pkg/zope/lib/python')
>>> import Zope
>>> root = Zope.app()

Now 'root' points to Zope's root folder. Traverse to the blog:

>>> coreblog = root['sandbox.rulemaker.net']['ngps']['blog']
>>> coreblog
<COREBlog instance at 91c7880>
>>> e = coreblog.entries[1]
>>> e
<Entry instance at 91cd280>
>>> e.title
'Winds Of Change'
>>> e.body   
"So, I have decided this web site needs some reworking.\n\n..."
>>> e.created
1078502400
>>> import time
>>> time.ctime(e.created)
'Sat Mar  6 00:00:00 2004'

I have the title, the body, the body's format - either plain text, StructuredText or HTML - and the timestamp. Looks like the lot. From here it is just a little more work to package the above into a program that extracts all the entries, comments and trackbacks.

The above cannot be done while that particular ZODB is running, i.e., in use by Zope. If my live, Internet-facing Zope is in a Zope Enterprise Objects (ZEO) set up, then I can, by acting as a ZEO client to it. This is similar to having REPL access to a Common Lisp web server.