Data Formatting

Why do I care?

You can avoid writing your own script to truncate text, format dates, make python data types look presentable, and a few other things. Archetypes includes a skins-layer script to do these things, and you can invoke it quite easily in templates. 

Where does it live?

The script lives at Products/ATContentTypes/skins/ATContentTypes/formatCatalogMetadata.py.

How do I use it?

You use it like this:

<td tal:define="excerpt python:context.formatCatalogMetadata(resource['description'])"
    tal:content="excerpt|string:description goes here">
 [Description]
</td>

This will truncate the description to whatever the value of search_results_description_length is set to in portal_properties (160 characters by default), and add an continuation marker defined in the ellipsis value, also in portal_properties.

The whole enchilada

## Script (Python) "formatCatalogMetadata"
##bind container=container
##bind context=context
##bind namespace=
##bind script=script
##bind subpath=traverse_subpath
##parameters=value,long_format=True
##title=Determine whether the input is a DateTime or ISO date and localize it if so, also convert lists and dicts into reasonable strings.
##
from DateTime import DateTime
from ZODB.POSException import ConflictError
from Products.CMFPlone.utils import safe_callable
from AccessControl import Unauthorized

if value is None:
    return ''

if same_type(value, DateTime()):
    return context.toLocalizedTime(value.ISO(), long_format = long_format)

# Ugly but fast check for ISO format (ensure we have '-' and positions 4 and 7,
#  ' ' at positiion 10 and ':' and 13 and 16), then convert just in case.
if same_type(value, '') and value[4:-1:3] == '-- ::':
    try:
        DateTime(value)
    except ConflictError:
        raise
    except:
        # Bare excepts are ugly, but DateTime raises a whole bunch of different
        # errors for bad input (Syntax, Time, Date, Index, etc.), best to be
        # safe.
        return value
    return context.toLocalizedTime(value, long_format = long_format)

try:
    # Missing.Value and others have items() but don't have security assertions
    # to support accessing it.
    items = getattr(value, 'items', None)
except Unauthorized:
    items = None

if items is not None and safe_callable(items):
    # For dictionaries return a string of the form 'key1: value1, key2: value2' 
    value = ', '.join(['%s: %s'%(a,b) for a,b in items()])
if same_type(value,[]) or same_type(value,()):
    # Return list as comma separated values
    alist = []
    for item in value:
        if same_type(item, u''):
            alist.append(item)
        else:
            alist.append(str(item))
    value = ', '.join(alist)

if not same_type(value, u''):
    value = str(value)

pt = context.portal_properties
site_props = getattr(pt, 'site_properties', None)
if site_props is not None:
    max_length = site_props.getProperty(
        'search_results_description_length', 160  )
    ellipsis = site_props.getProperty('ellipsis', '...' )
else:
    max_length = 160
    ellipsis = '...'
if len(value) < max_length:
    return value
else:
    return '%s%s'%(value[:max_length],ellipsis)