[ruby-talk:13131] Re: IOWA (Was Re: ZPT, a next-generation template technology (repost))

On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Kent Dahl wrote:

> 2) "Back" button support was "missing". In alot of cases, I found that
> going back to the previous page shouldn't necessarily pop up the
> "session timeout" page. I was and am hoping that there would be some
> easy way to allow going back using the browser back button, since end
> users will do it, and the session timeout is "scary" for normal people.

That behavior is actually pretty flexible; you were probably playing with
it when it defaulted to only caching one page, and so would give that
message whenever you hit the back button and then clicked a link.  I think
it now defaults to 10, but you can set it (as does, for example, the
calculator example), by changing Iowa::Session.cachedPages.  You can also
override a component's handleBacktracking method to control this on a page
by page basis - for example, to throw PageExpired if the current state is
determined to be too out of date to show the user.

If you're playing with backtracking, you should also note that overriding
dup to cause deeper copies to be cached can be useful.

> 	Perhaps there is an easy way to do this, but then the "Moving Between
> Pages" section of the docs is yet to be written, and I didn't experiment
> that much :-)

Documentation is really the sore point, and I still don't have enough time
to do it properly.  But I'm very happy to answer direct questions.

> IOWA has alot of promise, but for now its a far cry from a real
> contender against Zope, IMHO.

True, and it will never get there unless we bring it there.  Kent, thanks
for the feedback - if IOWA's going to move forward, it'll only be from
talking about what's wrong with it; otherwise, I assume nobody cares and
work on other things.

Avi