[Archetypes-users] Newbie catalog issues (moving beyond the basics)

[Darran E. <dar...@an...>]

I am working on a couple of AT products for the Access
Grid community portal, www.agcentral.org.  With the help
of Cameron's book, the Plone Live book and IRC, I've
managed to get some basic functionality going - but now I'm
starting to struggle.  It'll be easier to explain my problems by
reference to the real site ...

If you look at the summary node listings page,
      http://agcentral.org/nodes
the URL for each entry points to a user-contributed instance
of an AT-based folderish NodeListing.  (I.e., you hover over
the first listing and see that it lives in the folder of user  
'greggles'.)
To keep the aggregated listings responsive, the summary
data s all kept in the portal_catalog (by making these fields in
the schema 'searchable'.)  That is, the aggregated listing simply
does a search for all objects of type NodeListing, and the
meta-data is available in returned result objects.

Problem 1:  Some listings have photos.  For example,
http://agcentral.org/Members/dee900/huxley-ag.  I'd like to put
a little icon beside such nodes.  One way is to make this ImageField
searchable.  I'm guessing that this is a really bad idea ;-)
What is a better way of getting this info into the catalog?

We've recently been working on a Quality Assurance program
for Access Grid nodes.   We've created a test protocol comprised of
15 different pass/fail tests, all of which need to pass to gain
a 3-month certification.  I've created a QualityAssurance
Product for logging test results.  Testers can create an instance
inside the folderish NodeListing.

Problem 2: We'd like QA'd nodes to have a check icon beside
the node name in the global listing.   How to go about this?
I've got an isQualityAssured() method in my QA product.  I also have
an isQualityAssured() method for my NodeListing product (searches
for a valid QA test in its children).  I can display the QA status in  
individual
node pages.  Question, how do I get this info into the catalog?  What
needs to happen is that when a tester saves a QA test, the containing
NodeListing needs to call isQualityAssured() and stuff the result into
an indexed BooleanField ...

  Any advice on these issues is most appreciated.

Cheers,
Darran.

Darran Edmundson (dar...@an...)
ANU Supercomputer Facility Vizlab
Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2600
tel: +61 2 6125-0517  fax: +61 2 6125-5088