Friday, April 23, 2021

The new BabelPreviewable model mixin

For the Lino Shop project we realized that the description fields of categories and products should be previewable. Since they are also babel fields, I wrote a new mixin lino.modlib.memo.BabelPreviewable.

First use case is lino_xl.lib.products, where Product and Category now inherit from it.

In lino.modlib.memo.Previewable I renamed the fields short_preview to body_short_preview and long_preview to body_long_preview, and started to prepare the case that we want to use this mixin for models where the previewable_field is not 'body'.

But I don’t yet use this possibility here. I prefer to change the field name for the description of products and categories from “description” to “body”. Making the name of the “source” field configurable would make things uselessly complicated.

To test whether everything works, we should add, to the body of some product or category, some memo command that renders translatable text.

How should a read-only RichTextField render its content? Should it “execute” the html tags (showing their result), or should it rather “show” them?

I think I made up my mind about read-only RichText fields: let’s remove the dangerouslySetInnerHTML option again. A read-only RichTextField widget should show the “real” source text, not a preview. When we want to see the preview, we have the body_short_preview and body_full_preview fields of the Previewable mixin.

I started to play with the new feature in Lino Shop. There is now a third panel in the product detail. One book now has a body with rich text.

About quicklinks and the dashboard layout

Another question is my little spontaneous change yesterday to have the products plugin automatically add quick links for every product type. It causes several unit tests to fail because –as expected– other applications now also have these quick links. This makes me think again. It seems clear that not every application wants these quick links. OTOH it’s as with the [My settings] quick link, which is now a standard: a standard is nice to have, but we want to customize it in different ways. For example I am not sure whether the Lino Welfare users (or their system admins) will be happy with this new [My settings] quick link. Anyway there should be a way to to customize the quick links. The default list should be customizable per application. And then they should –at least for some applications– be customizable per user as well. Quick links become a bit like dashboard items. And the dashboard has some open tickets:

• #4046 (Configurable dashboard cards)

• #3337 (React-Grid-Layout)

I currently imagine that we introduce a setting dashboard_layout, or more precisely a choicelist DashboardLayouts where users can select from an list of dashboard layouts. The dashboard would become like a detail view where the Site object itself acts as the table row.