On Dec 25, 2005, at 8:47 AM, Jeroen van Dongen wrote:
Dear list,
I've a question as to how to approach a particular (architectual)
problem best and would like your advise. I'm using Quixote 2.3, in case
that matters.
For the sake of argument say I'm building a to-do list (of course the
real problem is with something a bit more complex - I've choosen this
example for its simplicity).
I have two model-classes:
- TodoItem -> has_many: Notes
- Note
Furthermore I have four ui classes:
- TodoListUI -> list items, add item
- TodoItemUI -> display item, edit item
- NotesListUI -> list notes, add notes
- NoteUI -> display note, edit note
The Notes part is something I want to keep generic, so that I can
easily
associate notes with any type of object - not just with TodoItems.
The user can access the following urls:
- /todo/ -> TodoListUI -> lists all to do items
- /todo/12/ -> TodoItemUI(12) -> shows todo item 12
- /todo/12/update -> TodoItemUI.update(12, ...) -> updates item 12,
redirects to /todo/12/
- /todo/12/notes/ -> NotesListUI -> displays all notes related to item
12
- /todo/12/notes/3/ -> NoteUI -> displays note 3 (which apperently
related to item 12)
- /todo/12/notes/3/update -> ...
This is quite a 'restfull' layout I'd think. Now comes the issue. In
this scenario the user gets a 'todo item view' with a link to 'notes'.
So to view the related notes and work with them, he has to go to
another
page. In order to enhance the user interface, I want to offer a way to
show, add, edit and delete notes from the 'todo item view' (i.e.
inline). And there are various ways one could do that.
I could refactor NotesListUI so that I can do something like (all given
code is pseudo code - it's to illustrate, I don't expect it to run):
"""
class TodoItemUI:
def index():
form = Form()
form.add(TextField, 'todoitemlabel')
form.add(TextField, 'todoitemdescription')
form.render()
NotesListUI.show_notes()
"""
This gives scenario A. Now 'show_notes' could Inline a list of notes in
the TodoItem page, showing part of each note, with 'add', 'edit',
'delete' etc. links linking directly to /todo/#/notes/#/edit, etc. This
seems very clean to me, but makes that the user has to go to another
page to edit a note - I'd rather make is so that the user can edit the
notes inline as well.
Meet scenario B: inline a list of forms, one for each note. Now the
user
can edit each note and save it. But what if he edits two notes? Or a
note and the description of the item? That doesn't work, because he can
only submit one form at at time.
So lets do some more refactoring to get to scenario C:
"""
class TodoItemUI:
def create_form()
form = Form()
form.add(TextField, 'todoitemlabel')
form.add(TextField, 'todoitemdescription')
NotesListUI.add_notes(form)
return form
def index():
self.create_form().render()
def update():
f = self.create_form()
NotesListUI.update(f)
TodoItem.update()
redirect('to the note')
"""
Now the NotesListUI is refactored so that it exposes a method that will
add a set of HTML form fields for each note (probably delegating the
generation of each individual note-entry to NoteUI). TodoItemUI tunnels
the submitted form values to the NotesListUI, which for each note will
call the NoteUI.
The above approach (scenario C) seems best to me - but perhaps you
folks
have better ideas.
Also it has at least one issue. What if I want to have a paragraph of
text between the Todo-fields and the Notes in the 'todoitem' view?
Should I add a 'rawhtml' widget to the forms library and insert that in
between?
Best regards,
Jeroen van Dongen
It seems that in most cases you would want to read all the notes
together, but you would probably only want to modify 1 note at a time.
My feeling would be to just offer a link that will load the
corresponding edit view for the 1 note, whether separate or embedded
within the others notes, but rendered as a form instead.
Note that the quixote form handling seems to assume that you have only
one form per page. For form/widget rendering, you will have to either
provide the rendering yourself (i.e. do not call form.render()) or
override the various methods called by each widget's render().
mario
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