Thursday, April 17, 2014

Customized SubmitInsert actions

Updated docs/tickets/93 after two hours of efficient talk with Gerd.

The first thing I plan to do is an important surgery for Lino: make it possible to write customized SubmitInsert actions.

Concretely we “just” want Lino Welfare to prevent duplicate pcsw.Client records by doing a quick name search after the user confirmed the Insert window and before creating the record, including a possible feedback question “There is already a client named John Miller in our database. Are you sure you want to create another John Miller?”

This kind of dialog is currently not possible. The SubmitInsert action was implemented before Lino’s current action communication system was complete, that’s why it has currently a very sophisticated and unflexible implementation.

And it requires some rather important internal changes. But Gerd and I agreed that it makes sense to do this surgery now.

I started yesterday with some “hygienic preparations”: tidy up some of the code that will change:

#   modified:   lino/core/actions.py
#   modified:   lino/modlib/extjs/ext_renderer.py
#   modified:   lino/modlib/extjs/linoweb.js
#   modified:   lino/modlib/extjs/views.py

Checkin at noon: one big transplantation is done and most things seem to work. Cool! But there is a “detail” indicating a fundamental problem in my AJAX calls.

Here is how to reproduce it. Open FireFox and Firebug.

  • Go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/pcsw/Clients and click the “Insert” button.

  • Fill in last_name and first_name and click “Create”. The visible answer is as expected the new record in a detail window.

  • But if you press ENTER instead of clicking “Create”, then you get a server traceback:

    WARNING AjaxExceptionResponse:
NotImplementedError
<class 'lino.core.actions.InsertRow'> has no run_from_ui() method

  • In both cases your browser will send a POST to that same address, with your form field values plus two fields rp and an.

  • The difference between the two is that an is post in the first case (i.e. this will become a SubmitInsert action) and insert in the econd case.

    ls_bbar_actions: [
    { “itemId”: “post”,

    “menu_item_text”: “Erstellen”, “tooltip”: “Datensatz erstellen und dann im Detail-Fenster u00f6ffnen”, “panel_btn_handler”: function(panel){panel.save(null,true,’post’)}, “text”: “Erstellen”, “overflowText”: “Erstellen”, “auto_save”: false },