[Dev] Those annoying __str__ methods

[Donn Denman]

Andi,

You mentioned how often you curse those __str__ methods, on items like 
EmailAddress, and I've been thinking maybe we should move them.  You 
hate is that they are hooked in to str(), so you end up calling them by 
accident, often when debugging as I recall.  What I like is that 
there's a known way to convert things to a nice user-readable 
representation.  The Chandler convention of using the "displayName" 
attribute doesn't seem to work well in some cases, because you may need 
a method to decide how to display.  You probably want a method for ref 
collections, and even things like EmailAddress have a couple different 
ways that they display based on whether or not a fullName attribute is 
present.  So I figured __str__ was the standard way to do this when a 
method is needed.   But there's no reason we need to use __str__.  
Maybe we should use a display() method instead of __str__, and both of 
us will be happy?

We don't actually have very many __str__ methods yet, so it wouldn't be 
too hard to make a change like this.  It would be great if ref 
collections knew how to display themselves as a nice comma-separated 
list of displayed items.  Most items would inherit a default display() 
method that just uses the displayName attribute.

What do you think?  Should we move the __str__ methods?  Is there some 
other standard that we should be adopting?  Let me know if you think 
this is a good idea, and I'll try to work with you on this.

- Donn
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