An administration tool for performing mass text substitution on Plone contents
Project description
Read carefully!
Even if this product is giving you an high level Plone user interface, it’s not designed for end users or “normal” site administrators. You must be a Python regular expression expert (probably a Grand Master).
Introduction
This product will give to your Plone site managers a tool for performing text search using regular expressions query and optionally performing text substitutions on the main rich text field of your site’s contents.
How to use
This product is designed for performing the same text type of replacement operation on many documents without going to edit every ones.
By default the product works with all know rich text fields of Plone contents, that are:
text field from Page content type
text field from Event content type
text field from News Item content type
text field from Collection content type (old-style also)
You can extending the set above providing 3rd party extensions (see below).
Accessing the “Bulk modify contents” panel
In your “Site setup” section you will find a new “Bulk modify contents” panel. All operations take places from this page.
Basic search
The upper section of the page is about searching contents.
You must select which content types you want to inspect by checking the “Content types” section. Although this selection display all content types, note that only a subset of them usable (for example: the Link content types is not using any text field right now).
This selection will trigger a catalog search of all types in the selection (so keep this selection at minimum).
The most important field is the “Search regex”, where you must write a regular expression. For every content type found, it’s text field will be loaded and text inside wil be parsed for searching matches with the regex.
You can change some regex search configuration option using the “Regex flags” set of checkboxes.
Now you can hit the search button below.
Results
Results of the search are displayed in a table at the bottom of the page.
The table will contain a preview of the found text and minimal information about the content. Please note that a single document can be found multiple time in the table as the minimal entity is the text match, not the document itself.
Replace text
The simpler way of performing text replacement is get filling the “Default replacement” text area.
The table of results will change, providing a graphical preview of what will be changed applying your replacement expression.
The user must now select all replacement that he really want to apply, the click the “Modify selected” button. Only selected matches are changed.
Replacing options
When changing text you are (obviously) changing a Plone content, so you have some additional option available:
- Do not update anything (silent change)
Useful if you want to fix some contents without updating other metadata from the content itself. Only the text field (and the Plone full text index) will be updated.
Site members will never notice this type of changes.
- Update modification time
Update also the last modification time of the document.
- Create a new version (if possible)
Full modification. If the content type is versionable, a new version will be saved.
Advanced use
Advanced server side operations
Sometimes a simple text regex expression is not enough. This product is supporting a way of handling really complex text substitution by calling some server side components.
By default, only one handler is available: “Convert internal links to resolveuid usage”, that can transform Plone internal links to content to a form that use the “resolveuid” call. This can be used in Plone sites where the TinyMCE option “Link using UIDs” were not enabled by mistake (something like the feature given by Kupu editor).
Adding new server side special handlers
Proving new IBulkModifyReplacementHandler utility will automatically display new special replacement:
<utility name="handler_name" component="your.product.utility.YourTextSpacialReplacement" provides="rt.bulkmodify.interfaces.IBulkModifyReplacementHandler" />
Extending handled types
To being able to change a text field of a type not handled, you must provide a proper adapter with a 3rd party product:
<adapter for="your.product.interfaces.IYourContentTypeInterface" provides="..interfaces.IBulkModifyContentChanger" factory="your.product.adapter.YourTextContentAdapter" />
TODO
Adding a way for using test substitution also as a running script instance
We need JavaScript testing
The product is designed for performing multiple write commit on ZODB, but probably a way of performing a single huge write operation can be useful
Credits
Developed with the support of Regione Emilia Romagna; Regione Emilia Romagna supports the PloneGov initiative.
Changelog
0.1.1 (2013-03-15)
When loading data from Archetypes field, use the raw format. This prevent substitution from destroying resolveuid usage. [keul]
When performing searches, display immediately the “loading” info, not after the first completed request [keul]
0.1 (2013-03-14)
Initial release
Project details
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