Monday, October 12, 2015

I discovered that #219 is actually not fixed. Or at least it seems so. But what made me believe (Friday, October 2, 2015) that it was solved? To check out.

Courses in Chatelet

I started to analyze #584 and noticed some problems in courses : Workshops which they did not yet report themselves, probably because they don’t yet record presences for the events of their courses:

  • they cannot change the state of a course because it never imported any workflow. Fixed. Note that we don’t import the default workflow (lino_xl.lib.courses.workflows) but define our own (in lino_welfare.chatelet.lib.courses.models).

  • The lino_xl.lib.cal.mixins.Reservation.get_recurrence_set() method returned None when no room was specified. I removed this rule from the default implementation (i.e. it is okay to generate events and record presences even when no room is specified. The room of a course is not important in Chatelet.)

  • The Course.suggest_cal_guests method now works a bit differently and is more easy to adapt by overriding Enrolment.is_guest_for.

Adapted and extended the test in lino_welfare.projects.chatelet.tests.test_chatelet.

Nobel peace prize to Tunisia

I just read that the Tunisian national dialogue quartet wins 2015 Nobel peace prize. Lino can be proud to have its second core developer living in Tunisia.

Documenting plugins that are not installed

The link to lino_welfare.chatelet.lib.courses.models didn’t work. This was due to a old and fundamental documentation problem: The API documentation is generated using Sphinx (more precisely the autodoc and autosummary extensions). And a Sphinx documentation tree is built in a single Python process. And Django does not allow to have more than one settings.py module within one Python process. The docs for Lino Welfare are built using lino_welfare.projects.std.settings.demo as settings (that’s defined in the docs/conf.py file). And the lino_welfare.chatelet.lib.courses.models happens to not be installed in that environment.

Sphinx doesn’t show the problem directly (it just says that it cannot import the module), but you can simulate what happens:

>>> import lino
>>> lino.startup('lino_welfare.projects.std.settings.demo')
>>> import lino_welfare.chatelet.lib.courses.models
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
  File ".../lino_xl.lib.courses/models.py", line 270, in EventsByTeacher
    master = dd.plugins.courses.teacher_model
AttributeError: 'Plugin' object has no attribute 'teacher_model'

This traceback came because the courses plugins are not designed to be used together. It is normal (in a Django context) that you get problems when you try to import both of them. We can work around this by providing fallback mechanisms like this one:

try:
    teacher_model = dd.plugins.courses.teacher_model
    pupil_model = dd.plugins.courses.pupil_model
except AttributeError:
    # Happens only when Sphinx autodoc imports it and this module is
    # not installed.
    teacher_model = 'foo.Bar'
    pupil_model = 'foo.Bar'

Temporary test cases

Note that above snippet is what I would call a temporary test case. It is not part of the Lino test suite, I just tested it manually while writing this blog entry, using:

$ python -m doctest docs/blog/2015/1012.rst

And note how such temporary test cases (until Saturday) had to start with something like…

>>> import os
>>> os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'lino.projects.docs.settings.demo'

while now (thanks to the extended lino.startup()) it is easier to remember:

>>> import lino
>>> lino.startup('lino_welfare.projects.std.settings.demo')