Add a way to import a published page into another published page

• Key: MODPYTHON-54
• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Resolution: Fixed
• Priority: Major
• Assignee: Graham Dumpleton
• Reporter: Nicolas Lehuen
• Component/s: importer
• Affects Version/s: 3.2.7
• Fix Version/s: 3.3.1

Description

Before mod_python 3.2, standard Python modules and published modules could be imported the same way, using apache.import_module. This had a number of disadvantages, leading to MODPYTHON-8, MODPYTHON-9, MODPYTHON-10, MODPYTHON-11 and MODPYTHON-12.

All these bugs were fixed by separating the published modules from the standard Python module. apache.import_module can still be used to import standard modules, but published modules are now fully managed by mod_python.publisher, and are not inserted into sys.modules.

The problem is that there is a use case of importing a published module from another published module :

/index.py----------------
def index(req):
    return "Hello, world !"

def utility_function(foobar):
    return foobar+1

/other.py----------------
import os
directory = os.path.split(__file__)[0]
other_index = apache.import_module("index",path=[directory])

def index(req):
    return "%s %i"%(other_index.index(req),other_index.utility_function(2004))

This was alread a bit of a hack in 3.1.4, but in 3.2 it does not really work the expected way since the imported module (other_index in the example) is not the same module as the one the publisher would use to publish /index.py. This could be troublesome if the developer wanted to share some data between the modules, e.g. a cache or a connection pool, but not if he only wanted to share some code.

Therefore, we need to provide a clean API in mod_python.publisher to allow developers to reference another published module.