About Profiles

Overview

GenericSetup uses two different kinds of profiles: a base profile captures the entire state of the site, while an extension profile represents an add-on / delta to be applied to the site’s configuration.

Registering Profiles

By convention profiles are stored in a profiles directory within a Zope product. They have to be registered explicitly using either the Products.GenericSetup.profile_registry.registerProfile() API or the equivalent genericsetup:registerProfile ZCML directive.

Here is example ZCML for a Zope product, MyProduct, which extends another product, BaseProduct:

<genericsetup:registerProfile
    name="install"
    title="Install MyProduct Extension"
    description="Adds local settings necessary for MyProduct."
    provides="Products.GenericSetup.interfaces.EXTENSION"
    for="Products.BaseProduct.interfaces.IBaseRoot"
    />

See also

Products.GenericSetup.zcml.IRegisterProfileDirective defines the API for this directive.

Alternatively, profiles can be registered by calling the Products.GenericSetup.profile_registry.registerProfile() API.

Here is the code for the same example:

from Products.BaseProduct.interfaces import IBaseRoot
from Products.GenericSetup import EXTENSION
from Products.GenericSetup import profile_registry

profile_registry.registerProfile(
        name='install',
        title='Install MyProduct Extension',
        description='Adds local settings necessary for MyProduct.',
        path='profiles/install',
        product='Products.MyProduct',
        profile_type=EXTENSION,
        for_=IBaseRoot)

See also

See IProfileRegistry.registerProfile for further details.

Note

Using this API for product initialization is deprecated.

Update Directives

For some XML elements there are additional attributes and values to specify update directives. They are only useful for extension profiles and you will never see them in snapshots and exports.

The following directives are generally useful for container elements and implemented by some setup handlers. Products using GenericSetup can also implement other update directives.

id="*" wildcard

Updates all existing items in the container with the same settings.

remove

Removes the specified item if it exists.

insert-before and insert-after

insert-before and insert-after specify the position of a new item relative to an existing item. If they are omitted or not valid, items are appended. You can also use * as wildcard. This will insert the new item at the top (before all existing items) or the bottom (after all existing items). If an item with the given ID exists already, it is moved to the specified position. This directive makes only sense for ordered containers.

Other Special Directives

purge

By default existing settings are purged before applying settings from base profiles. Extension profiles are applied in update mode. This directive overrides the default behavior. If True the existing settings of the current object are always purged, if False they are not purged.