Sunday, January 29, 2017

I returned back to using both subject and body in notification messages. This is part of #1322. I had removed the subject sometime in December 2016 because I thought that it is more clean to think about notifications as “one message to be sent to one user”, and that the distinction between “subject” and “body” was nonsense for notifications. But it isn’t: we need it e.g. when sending notifications as individual emails, or in grids where we want a quick overview of all notifications. only the application code.

These changes caused some failures in lino_welfare/projects/std/tests/test_notify.py when it calls the checkin action on a Guest (i.e. an instance of CheckinVisitor which inherits from NotifyingAction):

res = ses.run(guest.checkin)
self.assertEqual(res, {
    'message': '', 'success': True, 'refresh': True})

# it has caused a notification message:
self.assertEqual(Message.objects.count(), 1)

That test had passed until now, but this was wrong because the checkin action should not return an empty message.

This revealed a subtle bug which I called #1440. It is about parameter actions, i.e. actions which have a dialog window to be displayed before running the action. The action_param_values method of these actions is expected to return the default values for the parameters of the dialog window. When it is called, it is given the object on which it is being called. This object was None here. I added a new keyword argument selected_rows to BaseRequest.setup().

This bug is maybe related to #1366.

Fixing this bug required also a change in lino.modlib.extjs which I did in ext6 as well.

Upgrade on The Lino framework

A routine upgrade, mostly in order to test whether my yesterday’s changes didn’t introduce any regression.

This is a quick routine upgrade. There are no release notes. But an important question in this situation is “Do I need to run a migration? Were there any changes since last time which require a database migration?”.

We are Sunday evening and you might threaten to kill me, I still would not be able to say when was our last upgrade on that site or whether I did some changes to the database schema of Lino Noi since that moment.

The important thing to not forget is to make a snapshot of your database before pulling the new sources.

The trick for quickly testing whether you need to restore the snapshot is to run a temporary dump:

$ python manage.py dump2py t -o

This time it gave me the following error message:

django.db.utils.OperationalError: (1054, "Unknown column 'changes_change.changed_fields' in 'field list'")

Yes, of course. Now I remember that I added that field.

Usually this simply means that You now must restore your snapshot:

$ python manage.py run snapshots/restore.py

Voilà.

And then I adapted lino.modlib.comments.models.Comment.get_change_subject() and lino.modlib.notify.models.Message.send_summary_emails() so that the subject of emails are now more meaningful: “Luc commented on #1440 (…)” is a more meaningful subject than “You have 1 notifications”.