Published on

Release: Codegen fixes, createadminuser, form enhancements

Authors
  • Name
    Dave Coates

This release contains changes up until release/2022-11-15.

To upgrade any existing projects it's recommended to pull in the relevant commits from upstream.

git remote add upstream git@gitlab.internal.alliancesoftware.com.au:alliance/template-django.git
git cherry-pick XXX1 XXX2

In cases where you are significantly behind it may be easier to pull the whole app (eg. common_audit) in but you'll need to review the relevant branch.

In this release

Codegen fixes

Various fixes to codegen

createadminuser

Adds a command createadminuser that works like createsuperuser but creates an AdminProfile instead.

See this commit

Frontend Form improvements

Add handling for blankAsNull parsing on form fields which will convert an empty string to null. blankAsNull is set on fields based on the backend serializer allow_null value.

This changes also mean the custom parsing and other form enhancements now work with Form.Item - previously they only worked if you used Form.Field directly:

// This previously wouldn't use the customisations in the project for `Field`
<Form.Item field={myField} />

See this commit for the bulk of the changes and this commit for improved types on the form.

Other changes

  • 7592c68d - CrudFilterListView preserves query list parameters now
  • 6115abe3 - Fix issues with widget set on django form based server choices
  • 1ea92c87 - Fixes useEndpoint getPaginatorClass check to be compatible with latest Presto
  • 07b6b742 - Return correct pageSize for PageNumberPagination. Previously would return default rather than current value.
  • a2427853 - Audit updates to support latest version of pgtrigger
  • a7da780e - Fix getFormatterForField typescript types

Roadmap

Along with the normal gradual enhancements and fixes the next major things planned are:

Replace webpack

The exact replacement is not yet known but will likely either be Parcel or Vite. Vitaly has done most the work required to replace webpack with Parcel and conceptually it is similar in function to Webpack but is simpler to configure and faster.

Vite offers some interesting possibilities with how we do things in django. Specifically, in dev, it doesn't bundle at all - it uses browser support for ES modules instead. In production it still bundles for practical reasons (namely using ES modules for everything requires too many HTTP requests for all but the simplest dependencies).

This could allow us to remove the necessity of a global entry point to all django based React rendering and instead include things on demand as required. Right now if you want to render a component you have to expose it in django.tsx which gets added to a global window.DJANGO_REACT variable. We then dynamic imports to defer loading all the JS up front.

Codegen improvements

There are two types of codegen we use: auto codegen (e.g. presto viewmodels) and manual codegen (e.g. scaffold CRUD screens).

For auto codegen it would be nice to support things like reversing django URLs from the frontend or automatically creating endpoint definitions based on what's defined in the backend.

Manual codegen will be largely rewritten to make it easier to extend and customise. The existing code has been extended many times and has many hacks to make things work. Resolving things like required imports is very explicit right now and is somewhat fragile. This will change to a more declarative approach where each "thing" to codegen can declare it's requirements and the codegen can intelligently resolve dependencies etc. based on that. It will also provide a better basis for extracting the codegen into a separate module and publishing it outside of the template project.

View on GitHub