Friday, December 22, 2017

Django forms for Lino

For #2227 I started to read the detailed form API reference:

• The Forms API

• Form fields.

  Note the MultiValueField (aggregates the logic of multiple fields that together produce a single value) and the ModelChoiceField.

• The form rendering API

My thoughts after reading this:

• Continues to sound promising for me. I’d prefer using Django forms instead of continuing to override the as_plain_html() methods of our ExtJS elements.

• I’d probably start a new package lino.modlib.forms_ui.

• We don’t want application developers to have to write a template per form. Lino continues to generate HTML from layouts (detail_layout, insert_layout, params_layout).

• Layout elements contain additional information: width, height, custom label or help_text, custom roles_required.

• Special Lino layout elements are container and slave table

• We would use Django’s form fields and widgets with a custom form renderer which arranges the fields using a layout (detail_layout, insert_layout, params_layout).

Optimization in Amici

I added the lino.modlib.uploads plugin to Lino Amici.