A series of optimizations while working on Lino Prima

Thursday, October 31, 2024

During the last week I did the following changes, which I plan to push soon.

We have a new attribute lino.core.actors.Actor.row_template, which is a kind of a context-sensitive template for __str__() .

An avalanche of changes started because a piece of code in lino_react.react.views.ApiList.get() said:

ar = action_request(app_label, actor, request, request.GET, True)
ar.renderer = settings.SITE.kernel.default_renderer

Some of the results:

  • The default value for lino.core.requests.BaseRequest.renderer`is now determined a bit differently. Traditionally it is either :attr:`default_renderer (when the action request was created from an incoming HTTP request) or text_renderer (e.g. during a doctest).

  • The rt.login function is no longer implemented as a method of lino.core.site.Site but as a stand-alone function in lino.core.utils.

  • The rt.show function has a wrapper rt.shows, which returns the output as a string instead of printing it to stdout. In unit tests we had code like this:

    s = cal.GuestsByEvent.request(evt).to_rst()

    This has been replaced by:

    s = rt.shows(cal.GuestsByEvent, evt)

The signature of lino.core.actors.Actor.row_as_summary() is a bit more explicit. Before:

def row_as_summary(cls, ar, obj, **kwargs):

After:

def row_as_summary(cls, ar, obj, text=None, **kwargs):

The lino.core.actors.Actor.group_by is back, but in a new form. If specified, it must be a callable, and it currently only for the display mode “list” and only in the React front end. It uses a utility class lino.utils.html.Grouper. First usage example is in Lino Prima:

class ChallengeRatingsByProject(ChallengeRatings):
    ...
    group_by = [lambda obj: obj.challenge.project_section]

There are also a few subtle optimizations in React front end for Lino.