Vocabularies

Static and dynamic lists of valid values

The term “vocabulary” here refers to a list of values that are allowable by a given field. In most cases, that implies a field using a selection widget, like a multi-select list box or a drop-down.

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

class ISimplePizza(model.Schema):
    topping = schema.Choice(
            title=_(u"Choose your topping"),
            values=[_(u'Chicken'), _(u'Pepperoni'), _(u'Tomato')]
        )

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

class IPizzaOrder(model.Schema):

    ...

    orderItems = schema.Set(
            title=_(u"Your order"),
            value_type=schema.Choice(values=[_(u'Margherita'), _(u'Pepperoni'), _(u'Hawaiian')])
        )

The Choice field must be passed one of the following arguments, specifying its vocabulary:

• 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.

We’ll now explore various ways in which we can improve on the orderItems list.

Static vocabularies

Up until now, we have been using a static vocabulary, passing the list of allowable values as the values parameters to the Choice field. This is simple, but has a few draw-backs:

• If the vocabulary changes, we have to change the interface code.

• There is no way to separate the label that the user sees in the selection widget from the value that is extracted.

Dynamic vocabularies

To implement a more dynamic vocabulary, we can use a source. Before we do that, though, let’s consider where our data will come from.

We want to make the “order items” list more dynamic, and allow the list of available pizza types to be managed through the web. There are various ways to do this, including modelling pizzas as content items and creating a source that performs a catalog query to find them all. To manage a simple list, however, we can use plone.app.registry and install the list with our product’s extension profile. An administrator could then use the registry control panel to change the list. We won’t go into plone.app.registry in detail here, but you can read its documentation to get a full understanding of what it is and how it works.

First, we need to add plone.app.registry as a dependency in setup.py:

install_requires=[
    'setuptools',
    'plone.app.z3cform',
    'plone.directives.form',
    'plone.app.registry',
],

We also want to configure it when our product is installed in Plone, so we edit profiles/default/metadata.xml as follows:

<metadata>
    <version>1</version>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>profile-plone.app.z3cform:default</dependency>
        <dependency>profile-plone.app.registry:default</dependency>
    </dependencies>
</metadata>

Next, we create a registry.xml containing the following:

<registry>

    <record name="example.dexterityforms.pizzaTypes">
        <field type="plone.registry.field.Tuple">
            <title>Pizza types</title>
            <value_type type="plone.registry.field.TextLine" />
        </field>
        <value>
            <element>Margherita</element>
            <element>Pepperoni</element>
            <element>Hawaiian</element>
        </value>
    </record>

</registry>

After re-running buildout and (re-)installing our product in the

Terminology

When working with dynamic vocabularies, we 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 string, but can be any type of object.

• The title is a unicode string or translatable message. It is used in the form and displayed to the user.

One-off sources with a context source binder

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 view. The callable should return a vocabulary, which is achieved by using the SimpleVocabulary class from zope.schema.

Here is an example that returns our pizza types:

from plone.supermodel import model
from plone.directives import form

from zope.component import queryUtility
from zope.component import provider

from zope import schema

from zope.schema.interfaces import IContextSourceBinder
from zope.schema.vocabulary import SimpleVocabulary

from plone.registry.interfaces import IRegistry

...

@provider(IContextSourceBinder)
def availablePizzas(context):
    registry = queryUtility(IRegistry)

    terms = []

    if registry is not None:
        for pizza in registry.get('example.dexterityforms.pizzaTypes', ()):
            # create a term - the arguments are the value, the token, and
            # the title (optional)
            terms.append(SimpleVocabulary.createTerm(pizza, pizza.encode('utf-8'), pizza))

    return SimpleVocabulary(terms)

Here, we have defined a function acting as the IContextSourceBinder, as specified via the @provider() decorator. This looks up the registry and looks for the record we created with registry.xml above (remember to re-install the product in the Add-on control panel or the portal_quickinstaller tool if you modify this file). We then use the SimpleVocabulary helper class to create the actual vocabulary.

The SimpleVocabulary class additionally 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.

We can also instantiate a SimpleVocabulary directly and pass a list of terms in the initialiser as we have done above. The createTerm() class method can be used to create a term from a value, token and title. Only the value is required.

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

class IPizzaOrder(model.Schema):

    ...

    orderItems = schema.Set(
            title=_(u"Your order"),
            value_type=schema.Choice(source=availablePizzas)
        )

Parameterised sources

Sometimes, it is useful to parameterise the source. For example, we could generalise the pizza source to work with any registry value containing a sequence, by passing the registry key as an argument. This would allow us to create many similar vocabularies and call upon them in code.

This degree of generalisation is probably overkill for our use case, but to illustrate the point, we’ll outline the solution below.

First, we turn our IContextSourceBinder into a class that is initialised with the registry key

from zope.interface import implementer

@implementer
class RegistrySource(object):

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

    def __call__(self, context):
        registry = queryUtility(IRegistry)
        terms = []

        if registry is not None:
            for value in registry.get(self.key, ()):
                terms.append(SimpleVocabulary.createTerm(value, value.encode('utf-8'), value))

        return SimpleVocabulary(terms)

Notice how in our first implementation, the function provided the IContextSourceBinder interface, but the class here implements it. This is because the function was the context source binder callable itself. Conversely, the class is a factory that creates IContextSourceBinder objects, which in turn are callable.

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

orderItems = schema.Set(
        title=_(u"Your order"),
        value_type=schema.Choice(source=RegistrySource('example.dexterityforms.pizzaTypes'))
    )

When the schema is initialised on startup, the a RegistrySource object is instantiated, storing the desired registry key in an instance variable. Each time the vocabulary is needed, this object will be called (i.e. the __call__() method is invoked) with the context as an argument, and is expected to return an appropriate vocabulary.

Named vocabularies

Context source binders are great for simple dynamic vocabularies. They are also re-usable, since we can import the source from a single location and use it in multiple instances. However, we may want to provide an additional level of decoupling, by locating a vocabulary by name, not necessarily caring where or how it is implemented.

Named vocabularies 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 context source binder above, since they are looked up by name only.

We can turn our first dynamic vocabulary into a named vocabulary by creating a named utility providing IVocabularyFactory, like so:

from zope.component import queryUtility

from zope import schema
from zope.interface import implementer
from zope.schema.interfaces import IVocabularyFactory

from zope.schema.vocabulary import SimpleVocabulary

from plone.registry.interfaces import IRegistry

@implementer
class PizzasVocabulary(object):

    def __call__(self, context):
        registry = queryUtility(IRegistry)
        terms = []
        if registry is not None:
            for pizza in registry.get('example.dexterityforms.pizzaTypes', ()):
                # create a term - the arguments are the value, the token, and
                # the title (optional)
                terms.append(SimpleVocabulary.createTerm(pizza, pizza.encode('utf-8'), pizza))
        return SimpleVocabulary(terms)
grok.global_utility(PizzasVocabulary, name=u"example.dexterityforms.availablePizzas")

Note

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

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

orderItems = schema.Set(
        title=_(u"Your order"),
        value_type=schema.Choice(vocabulary='example.dexterityforms.availablePizzas')
    )

As you might expect, there are a number of standard vocabularies that come with Plone and third party packages, most of which are named vocabularies. Many of these can be found in the plone.app.vocabularies package, and add-ons such as plone.principalsource.