Thursday, March 25, 2021

I wrote a section React-specific actor attributes. But most of these options are “deprecated” and should be replaced by something else. I reviewed more passages in Customize how data is formatted.

A generic navigation panel for table views

Charles asked for a layout where you have a list view for navigating over your rows in a panel on the left, but otherwise a detail view. I wanted to know it and and finished up with a new generic virtual field navigation_panel. A first use case is the PersonDetail in Lino Amici. Here is the source code:

class PersonDetail(PersonDetail):

    main = "general family more"

    general = dd.Panel("navigation_panel:20 general_box:60", label=_("General"))

    general_box = """
    overview contact_box
    contacts.RolesByPerson:30 lists.MembersByPartner:30 cal.EntriesByGuest:30
    """

    ...

And the result:

../../_images/0325_2059.png ../../_images/0325_2101.png

A nice new feature. Thanks to Charles for the request. Yes, we should have a look at the cosmetic aspects. I used quite a few dirty hacks to get a decent look. And then we probably want to hide away the navigation buttons from the toolbar when we have such a panel. One disadvantage is that you cannot navigate when you have activated the second or third tab panel.

While working on this, I discovered and fixed a rather invisible bug: lino.core.fields.wildcard_data_elems() was returning all virtual fields. The official behaviour is that virtual fields are not returned unless they are defined with lino.core.fields.VirtualField.wildcard_field set to True. This rule is for performance reasons. Some virtual fields a rather heavy (e.g. the navigation_panel must query the whole database to get all primary keys), and even when they are hidden, Lino has to include wildcard fields in the result because the end user might have enabled them. It was a bit stupid to compute the navigation panel for each row of a grid.

>>> from lino import startup
>>> startup('lino_amici.projects.amici1.settings')
>>> from lino.api.doctest import *
>>> # [f.name for f in rt.models.contacts.Person._meta.private_fields]
>>> [f.name for f in rt.models.contacts.Persons.wildcard_data_elems()]

I reviewed the Introduction to tables page, which contained some obsolete bullshit (using a desktop.py module is obsolete). And it did not explain what are wildcard fields. Renamed “table” to “table views”.