Tuesday, May 20, 2014

I have still some questions to meditate.

For the end-user there are two types of excerpts: (1) those who were until now a simple “Print” button (usually together with a “Clear Cache” button) and (2) those where the user chooses the “excerpt type” before printing.

For example in Lino Welfare, Budgets and Contract are case (1). They have zero or one “printout”. They either have been printed, or they haven’t. There’s never more than one printout per Budget or Contract. pcsw.Client is an example of case (2). You cannot simply say “Print” on a client, you must also specify “what” to print (current choices are a curriculum vitae, eid-content and a todo list “plan d’action”).

For Budgets and Contracts there will be no visible difference for the user. The advantage of using excerpts is that now these printouts are visible in the “history” (per client or per user).

Excerpts make it possible to dynamically configure the choice between (1) and (2). A concrete use case that drops into mind: Invoices (in an accounting application) are usually case (1), but a customer might decide that they want every invoice printed (possibly) twice, one “internal” version (used e.g. by the packaging team) and one version for the client. That would be case (2).

With case (1), users just want their “Print” and “Clear cache” buttons. With case (2) it gets more complex.

Todo:

  • Handle case (2) using a ComboButton

  • Convert existing data.

  • Is there a way do avoid rewriting the existing templates vse.odt and art60-7.odt? Currently they don’t work because the printing context has changed.

Converted also cal.Guest and cal.Event to the new system (they are no longer Printable).

I removed the body_template functionality from ml.notes.NoteType (which was there from before we had excerpts).

The following decision took some time (to understand what’s happening and to choose the solution):

I renamed the get_templates_group methods in lino.mixins.printable to get_template_groups. And accordingly I changed lino.utils.config.find_template_config_files

Because I had the following problem: I want Lino to use the same template Default.odt for most excerpts. This should be in a template group excerpts. But apps must be able to define model-specific templates (as cv.odt, eid-content.odt, art60-7.odt). And these should not get mixed up with each other, so they should use in their model-based template group. So the list of possible choices for the lino.modlib.excerpts.Excerpt.template field is a combination of a files found in all groups.

Another question is about the template context of an excerpt: Should this refer to the Excerpt instance? Or rather to the Excerpt.owner, i.e. the object being printed?

Added a subtle new feature: If master_key is given, then this field is automatically added to hidden_columns.