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Release: Display Values, Link Query Params and more

Authors
  • Name
    Dave Coates

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_lib) in but you'll need to review the relevant branch.

In this release

Display Values

This release introduces a standard way to format values in a project for display to a user. Previous CRUD templates outputted the value raw with a few special cases for things like choices. The new methods handle many more cases including numeric formatting, file download links, date & time formatting and handling lists.

There's two new methods in common_lib: default_display_for_field and default_display_for_value. The first handles formatting of a value when the model field is known and so some extra context is available. For example if it's a DecimalField we know the number of decimal places to use in formatting. default_display_for_value handles a raw value - so will format dates or numbers but has no extra details that might be provided at the field level.

They are prefixed with default_ as the are the core implementation that we'll update in common_lib but there'll often be project specific customisations. These go in the display_for_field and display_for_value methods which in turn call default_display_for_field and default_display_for_value (on project initialisation the xenopus_frog_app is renamed to something specific to your project).

This split makes it easier to pull in changes to the common_lib files from the template project to your project.

Usage

The most common usage is via the display_value template tag. If you have a record pass that and the field name:

{% display_value user "email" %}

You can optionally provide a default value:

{% display_value user "email" empty_value="(none)" %}

In the case where no record exists pass the value directly:

{% display_value creation_date %}

Upgrading

To upgrade pull in the commits from the merge request.

Also consider updating any existing CRUD templates to use the display_value template tag. See this commit for an example.

  • bf40687 - main commit for feature
  • 58aca27 - updates codegen to use display_value
  • 0d69c31 - this commit adds the display.py file to xenopus_frog_app and as such will conflict as the app name will have changed. You'll need to resolve this manually.
  • 7d4328c - not important, only useful for new projects
  • b21a77f - this updates the provided templates for user models to use display_value. This will conflict - it may be easier to make the changes manually to your existing templates.
  • ba6019b - this includes doc updates. This will conflict on xenopus_frog_app and should be resolved manually.

The link template tag makes it easy to render links with permission checks etc.

Thanks to Jason it now supports query parameters.

Usage

// Renders <a href="/staff/4/?from=123">View</a>
{% link "myapp:staffprofile_view" id="4" query_from="123" %}View{% endlink %}

Upgrading

To upgrade pull in commit 4f9e7512.

HTML5 Email Field

Django's email validation regex does not match that in the HTML5 spec. The new HTML5EmailField remedies this such that the validation applied by browser on a type="email" field matches the validation done by django on the backend. This is a drop in replacement for EmailField.

Usage

class MyModel(models.Model):
    email = HTML5EmailField(unique=True)

Upgrading

To upgrade pull in commit 7fd7bdfb for the field itself and eff9f94f7 for change to User to use it.

Presto

Version 0.0.11 released with a minor fix & enhancement, see the changelog.

Thanks to Jason & Liz for contributing these.

Misc changes

The following other changes came in since the last release

  • 7ba9db0 - You can now override pagination details on your descendant class using attributes without having to re-implement __init__ (thanks Jason)
  • c962b41 - Typescript type fixes for model cache
  • 1be8e63b - When number of results on list view was less than page size the number of results was not shown. This rectifies that (thanks Jason)
  • ac6b1231 - Enforces loading order of scripts such that config.ts is loaded first. This avoids issues where other files may rely on config settings. (thanks Vitaly for finding this)
  • 61990255 - Adds default logging config for base xenopus_frog_app (this is renamed on project start - so replace this with your main project app)
  • f152efa5 - Remove django-compat from project. No longer required with latest version of hijack.
  • 2930099c - Linter now ignores Ansible vault secrets (thanks Nick and Jason)
  • a2647392 - Use tilde instead of caret for Presto version. See Caret: Major Zero for details as to why this was necessary. (thanks Vitaly)

Upcoming

Things currently in the works

  • PDF generation using puppeteer for cases where need to render page with javascript
  • Audit module using postgres triggers to track model changes
  • Module to make uploading direct to S3 as seamless as possible
  • A rewritten training program to get you up to speed on Alliance Platform
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