Thanks for this suggestion. Strange this never came up. Give a couple of days and I will have 1 and 3 fixed. 2 involved making mode changes to simplejson and it will make it more difficult to keep in sync with the original. Let me give some thoughts to it. Suggestions are welcome.
Massimo On Feb 25, 4:52 pm, nick name <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello good people. > > I've recently started a project using web2py, and I find it extremely well > designed. However, within a 2 days of starting, I have already needed to > patch it in 3 places, so either I'm doing something wrong, something > non-standard, or I should find out what is the preferred way of submitting > patches :) > > *1st: date/datetime fields on sqlite3* > > My project will run on PostgreSQL in production, but for the purpose of > communicating with other developers, it is very beneficial to use the > sqlite3 backend for now, which is what I do. By default, storing date or > datetime fields in sqlite3 gets them retrieved again as strings, which kills > my application logic (the dates need to be processed as dates). > > Fortunately, sqlite3 has a provision for solving that - it is called > "detect_types". Unfortunately, web2py does not expose this setting through > the DAL in any user settable way. My patch is as follows (against the tar of > Version 1.91.6 (2011-01-03 17:55:14)) > > ~/web2py/gluon$ diff origdal.py dal.py > 1316c1316 > < self.pool_connection(lambda dbpath=dbpath: > sqlite3.Connection(dbpath, check_same_thread=False)) > ---> self.pool_connection(lambda dbpath=dbpath: > > sqlite3.Connection(dbpath, check_same_thread=False, > detect_types=sqlite3.PARSE_DECLTYPES)) > > This serves my purposes perfectly, and I suspect would be useful for anyone > using sqlite3 - it instructs the dbapi module to convert fields of type DATE > or TIMESTAMP (which are stored as strings) into a datetime.datetime object. > So it might be useful for inclusion in general. However, there are other > options (see e.g. PARSE_COLNAMES, isolation_level - > <http://docs.python.org/library/sqlite3.html#module-functions-and-cons...> > for more) that might be useful for other users. > > Additionally, it might be useful to expose the sqlite3 module or the > connection objects so that the user may register_converter() or > create_aggregation() on them. I'm not yet familiar enough with web2py to > propose a web2py-ish way to pass these options to dal - but if someone else > does, I'll try to implement and provide a patch. > > *2nd: Talking json to a WCF / .NET client > * > web2py has an excellent json interface built in. It's perfect for all my > uses except for one thing: Microsoft, in their usual > embrace-extend-extinguish mentality, have perverted their json so that dates > are encoded in json with the following format: \/Date(unixepoch-hhmm)\/where > unixepoch is the time in seconds since 1/1/1970, and "-hhmm" is a timezone, > e.g. -0500 for Eastern Standard Time and +0100 for London Daylight Saving > Time; the --hhmm component is optional and defaults to 0000=UTC. > > The '\' in \/Date is an escape sequence, which is legal but ignored by every > json parser out there. Microsoft code serializes dates like that (which is > fine, I can parse it in Python well - the backslash escape just gets eaten > away) - but it also expects that to be there when deserializing; I haven't > figured out a way to do that with simplejson, because if I try to put the > backslash there, simplejson will escape it and the result would be > \\/Datewhich is rejected by the MS parser. > > My solution here was to modify simplejson so that it also escapes the '/' > character, and just return '/Date(...)/' as my date value. This works, and > (based on the same reasoning used by MS) is safe for anything. But I don't > like it; Is there any simpler solution for that, that would escape > *only*datetime values? > > Note: replacing jsonencoder's default() function is not enough - I had to > patch ESCAPE, ESCAPE_ASCII and ESCAPE_DCT as well. > > Also, I am planning to modify the decoder to notice this and parse this is a > datetime object directly, but haven't done so yet - if there's a > particularly simple way to do that, please point me in the right direction. > > See <http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2008/01/18/dates-and-json.aspx> > for more details > > *3rd: Generating xml output* > > This one is really small; when I serialize my output as xml, I need the root > object to be called "root", rather than the default "document". I have fixed > that by adding the "key='root'" to generic.xml's serialization call, and if > I needed more flexibility I would have made that read from an application > global setting. > > However, I think this is better served as something programmatically > conifgurable - makes no sense to me that the top element's name gets decided > by a view and every other element's name comes from a dict() I return.
