Get a content type class by name in Zope

I recently had the problem of finding out if a content type in Plone implemented a certain interface, but only given the name of the content type rather than an instantiated object or its class. Whilst it’s easy to create an instance given a content type name, using the Portal Type Tool, creating an instance to test and then deleting it felt wrong. Unfortunately the Types Tool seems to provide no easy way of determining the class of a given type.

The solution comes from a combination of the Portal Types Tool’s type information and the Archetypes Tool’s information about the implementation:

from Products.CMFCore.utils import getToolByName

def has_interface(portal, typeName, interface):
    """ Portal is the root portal object, typeName is a
        string such as 'MyDocumentType' and interface
        is the interface class to be tested against. """

    pt = getToolByName(portal, 'portal_types')
    at = getToolByName(portal, 'archetype_tool')
    typeinfo = pt.get(typeName)
    if typeinfo:
        package = typeinfo.product
        type = at.lookupType(package, typeName)
        if type:
            klass = type['klass']
            return interface.isImplementedByInstancesOf(klass)
    return False