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Generic scaffolding for Django

Project description

With django-generic-scaffold you can quickly create and route CRUD generic class based views for your models so you will have a basic CRUD interface by writing only a couple of lines of extra code!

django-generic-scaffold is different from other scaffolding tools because it generates all views/url routes on-the-fly and not by outputing python code.

Installation

Install it with pip install django-generic-scaffold, or if you want to use the latest version on github, try pip install git+https://github.com/spapas/django-generic-scaffold.

If you want to use the template tags and the fallback templates of django-generic-scaffold, please put it in your INSTALLED_APPS setting. If you don’t need the template tags or fallback templates then no other installation is needed.

Simple usage

Let’s say you have defined a model named Book in your models.py. In your views.py or, even better in a module named scaffolding.py define a class that overrides CrudManager:

from generic_scaffold import CrudManager
import models

class BookCrudManager(CrudManager):
    model = models.Book
    prefix = 'books'

Now, include the following lines to the urls.py of your application:

from scaffolding import BookCrudManager # or from views import BookCrudManager depending on where you've put it
book_crud = TestCrudManager()

# [...] define your urlpatters here

urlpatterns += test_crud.get_url_patterns()

You may now visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/books to get a list of your TestModel instances. The following methods have also been created:

  • Create: http://127.0.0.1:8000/bookscreate

  • Detail: http://127.0.0.1:8000/booksdetail/<id>

  • Edit: http://127.0.0.1:8000/booksupdate/<id>

  • Delete: http://127.0.0.1:8000/booksdelete/<id>

If you don’t do anything else, the default fallback templates will be used. You should add after you add a template named app_name/testmodel_list.html (which is the default template for the ListView). Beyond the list view, you have also the following views:

The prefix option you set to the BooksCrudManager method will just prepend this prefix to all created urls and can also be used to get your url names for reversing.

Template selection

There’s a bunch of fallback templates that will be used if no other template can be used instead. These template are for testing purposes only and should be overriden (unless you want to quickly see that everything works). Now, there are two ways you can redefine your templates:

  • Implicitly: Just add appropriate templates depending on your app/model name, for example for app_name and TestModel you can add the following templates:

For create/update add app_name/testmodel_form.html, for list add app_name/testmodel_list.html, for detail add app_name/testmodel_detail.html, for delete add app_name/testmodel_confirm_delete.html.

  • Explicitly: You can use the action_template_name configuration option to explicitly set which templates will be used for each action (please check below for more).

So, the priority of templates is:

  • Explicit templates (if configured)

  • Implicit templates (if found)

  • Fallback templates (as a last resort)

Configuration

Most of the time, you’ll need to configure three things before using django-generic-scaffold: The form class used for create and update, the access permissions for each generic class based view and the templates that each view will use. These can be configured just by settings options to your class.

  • To configure the form class that will be used, use the option form_class.

  • To configure the template names explicitly, use action_template_name where actions is list, detail, update, create or delete. So to configure the detail template name to be foo.html you’ll use the option detail_template_name = 'foo.html'.

  • To set the permissions you have to set the permissions attribute to a dictionary of callables. The keys of that dictionary should be list, detail, update, create or delete while the values should be callables like login_required or permission_required('permission') etc.

Finally, for any other configuration of the generated class based views you’ll need to define mixins that will be passed as a list using the option action_mixins (again action is either list, detail, etc).

API and template tags

If you want to use the provided template tags to your templates, you’ll need to add {% load generic_scaffold_tags %} near the top of your template. Then you may use set_urls_for_scaffold which will output the URLs of the selected scaffold depending on your configuration. This tag can receive three parameters: The django app name, the model name and the prefix name. You can either use the combination of app name / model name or just the prefix. It will return a dictionary with all the scaffolded urls for this model. For example, to get the url names for the model test2 (careful you must use the internal model name) belonging to the app test1 you’ll use {% set_urls_for_scaffold "test1" "test2" as url_names %} and then you could use the attributes list, create, detail, update, delete of that object to reverse and get the corresponding urls, for example use {% url url_names.list } to get the url for list.

There’s also a similar function named get_url_names that you can use to get the urls for your scaffolds.

For example, you can do something like:

from generic_scaffold import get_url_names
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse

names = get_url_names(prefix='test')
list_url = reverse(names['list'])

Sample configuration

A sample config that uses a different form (TestForm), defines different behavior using mixins for create and update and needs a logged in user for update / delete / create (but anonymous users can list and detail) is the following:

from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required

class TestCrudManager(CrudManager):
    prefix = 'test'
    model = models.TestModel
    form_class = forms.TestForm
    create_mixins = (CreateMixin, )
    update_mixins = (UpdateMixin, )
    permissions = {
        'update': login_required,
        'delete': login_required,
        'create': login_required,
    }

Changelog

v.0.2.0

  • Braking changes for API and template tags

  • Add example project

  • Add support and configure tox for Django 1.9

  • A bunch of fallback templates have been added (generic_scaffold/{list, detail, form, confirm_delete}.html)

  • Use API (get_url_names) for tests and add it to docs

  • Add (url) prefix as an attribute to CrudManager and fix templatetag to use it.

  • Prefix has to be unique to make API and template tags easier to use

  • Model also has to be unique

v.0.1.2

  • Add tests and integrate with tox

  • Add some basic templates (non-empty, mainly for tests)

v.0.1.1

  • Add template tags to get crud urls

v.0.1

  • Initial

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