Just looking for a bit of a push in the right direction.
I'm creating a multi-step user sign up to receive a personalized assessment. But I'm having trouble trying to wrap my head around the multi-step progress within Django and a SQL point of view.
These are my steps, each to be a separate form:
Sign Up (Make an Account)
Complete Profile Information
Create an application
Complete required questions within application - This may need to be broken down even further.
I've figured out redirections from each form, but my biggest concern is saving which step they're up to. E.g. What if they close the browser at end of step 2, how do I have a way to prompt them to come and complete step 3 onwards.
To make it clear, I'm not looking for saving the state within the browser. Needs to be saved within the database to support access from other devices, for example.
To add onto it, what if I was to allow them to make multiple applications (steps 3 and 4), but only allowing one to be open at a time. E.g. One gets rejected but we allow them to reapply.
Just looking for some tips/suggestions on how to structure something like this. If anyone has any good websites that I can use as an example on how they achieved something similar, that would also be helpful.
I've been down the path of redirection madness and that created more work then it was worth, so I'm hoping for a more dynamic method.
Related
I am somewhat of a beginner at Python and I am currently starting some brainstorming and planning for a project to simplify the tedious task of filling out a product order form for a friend's business. I am wanting to create a program with an interface that takes in input and writes to an already existing pdf form of the physical order form. I would also like to implement being able to then email that form to another coworker and having accessible information of previous orders from the current customer ordering.
I am most curious about how to write to an already existing pdf form and just fill in the blanks, potentially using a PDF Reader? Also, for product catalog data and customer order history, would using dictionaries suffice or would it be better to use some python database?
I know I could figure out how to individually do each of those tasks but I don't know how to tie it all together properly to distribute it, either making a WebApp or an executable file from the script and just use tkinter or another GUI library for the interface, or if there is a more obvious and convenient option?
If I were to do a WebApp, what would be my best option, I've seen options such as Anvil, Flask, Django, and I just don't know what would be best for what I'm trying to accomplish.
I know this is a longshot and vague but any advice or guidance in the right direction would be much appreciated!
I'd go with a web app here. Personally, I prefer Django, and I don't think that it would be too difficult to learn it well enough for your purposes!
Regarding saving product catalog data and customer order history: I would definitely recommend using a database for your backend, which Django helps you do! Database integration is almost ridiculously easy using Django.
Here's some resources for the specific things you asked about:
Django vs. Flask
Working with HTML forms (Django) (this will help with taking user input)
filling an existing PDF form in Python (this will help with using user input to fill out the pdfs)
How to send email attachments in Python? (this will help you email your coworker the filled out pdf)
If you need more help/guidance, definitely feel free to follow up!
I'm working on a software that deals with drones.
My team introduced a server to allow command and control activities with multiple drones.
Now, I'd like to test its API and create a python module for automated testing.
The API includes actions like add marker, delete marker and so on and so forth that you can do in the app.
I've been researching if there might be a tool to allow me to randomize these actions automatically to create scenarios that imitate user actions.
For example:
check the license, add mission, add a marker, fly to position and delete Marker.
Each of those actions is a request sent to the server within the app, but I've already recreated those activities as functions in python. The server actions have also been written in Python(server is tornado). Now I just need to find a way to randomize their activation(the data they send to the server is generated randomly and legally as well, and that's not a problem).
So before wasting a lot of my time creating these scenarios by hand, I'm sure someone already faced this kind of problem. I couldn't find it here though. Searched for hours but there are so many questions I might have missed something related to my issue.
I can build such a tool myself and even share a git to it here if it comes to that. Then it will be helpful to anyone encountering this question.
I thought it would be worth asking anyway.
Let me know if there are any other details you need to know to answer this question.
Thanks!
I've recently started working with Django. I'm working on an existing Django/Python based site. In particular I'm implementing some functionality to create and display a PDF document when a particular URL is hit. I have an entry in the app's urls file that routes to a function in the views file and the PDF generation is working fine.
However, the view function is pretty big and I want to extract the code out somewhere to keep my view as thin as possible, but I'm not sure of the best/correct approach. I'll probably need to generate other PDFs in due course so would it make sense to create a 'pdfs' app and put code in there? If so, should it go in a model or view?
In a PHP/CodeIgniter environment for example I would put the code into a model, but models seem to be closely linked to database tables in Django and I don't need any db functionality for this.
Any pointers/advice from more experienced Django users would be appreciated.
Thanks
If you plan to scale your project, I would suggest moving it to a separate app. Generally speaking, generating PDFs based on an url hit directly is not the best thing to do performance-wise. Generating a PDF file is pretty heavy on you server, so if multiple people do it at the same time, the performance of your system will suffer.
As a first step, just put it in a separate class, and execute that code from the view. At some point you will probably want to do some permission checks etc - that stays in the view, while generation of the PDF itself will be cleanly separated.
Once you test your code, scale etc - then you can substitute that one line call in the view into putting the PDF generation in a queue and only pulling it once it's done - that will allow you to manage your computing powers better.
Yes you can in principle do it in an app (the concept of reusable apps is the basis for their existence)
However not many people do it/not many applications require it. It depends on how/if the functionality will be shared. In other words there must be a real benefit.
The code normally goes in both the view/s and in the models (to isolate code and for the model managers)
I have a written a short python script which takes a text and does a few things with it. For example it has a function which counts the words in the text and returns the number.
How can I run this script within django?
I want to take that text from the view (textfield or something) and return a result back to the view.
I want to use django only to give the script a webinterface. And it is only for me, maybe for a few people, not for a big audience. No deployment.
Edit: When I first thought the solution would be "Django", I asked for it explicitly. That was of course a mistake because of my ignorance of WSGI. Unfortunately nobody advised me of this mistake.
First off, is your heart really set on it being Django? If not I'd advise that Django, whilst an awesome framework, is a bit much for your needs. You don't really need full stack.
You might want to look at Flask instead, which is a Python micro-framework (and dead easy to use)
However, since you asked about Django...
You can create a custom Django command (docs here) that calls your script,
that can be called from a view as described in this question.
This has the added benefit of allowing you to run your script via the Django management.py script too. Which means you can keep any future scripts related to this project nice and uniform.
For getting the results of your script running, you can get them from the same bit of code that calls the command (the part described in the last link), or you can write large result sets to a file and process that file. Which you choose would really depend on the size of your result set and if you want to do anything else with it afterwards.
What nobody told me here, since I asked about Django:
What I really needed was a simple solution called WSGI. In order to make your python script accessible from the webbrowser you don't need Django, nor Flask. Much easier is a solution like Werkzeug or CherryPy.
After following the django tutorial, as suggested in a comment above, you'll want to create a view that has a text field and a submit button. On submission of the form, your view can run the script that you wrote (either imported from another file or copy and pasted; importing is probably preferable if it's complicated, but yours sounds like it's just a few lines), then return the number that you calculated. If you want to get really fancy, you could do this with some javascript and an ajax request, but if you're just starting, you should do it with a simple form first.
I want to load info from another site (this part is done), but i am doing this every time the page is loaded and that wont do. So i was thinking of having a variable in a table of settings like 'last checked bbc site' and when the page loads it would check if its been long enough since last check to check again. Is there anything silly about doing it that way?
Also do i absolutely have to use tables to store 1 off variables like this setting?
I think there are 2 options that would work for you, besides creating a entity in the datastore to keep track of "last visited time".
One way is to just check the external page periodically, using the cron api as described by jldupont.
The second way is to store the last visited time in memcache. Although memcache is not permanent, it doesn't have to be if you are only storing last refresh times. If your entry in memcache were to disappear for some reason, the worst that would happen would be that you would fetch the page again, and update memcache with the current date/time.
The first way would be best if you want to check the external page at regular intervals. The second way might be better if you want to check the external page only when a user clicks on your page, and you haven't fetched that page yourself in the recent past. With this method, you aren't wasting resources fetching the external page unless someone is actually looking for data related to it.
You could also use Scheduled Tasks.
Also, you don't absolutely need to use the Datastore for configuration parameters: you could have this in a script / config file.
If you want some handler on your GAE app (including one for a scheduled task, reception of messages, web page visits, etc) to store some new information in such a way that some handler in the future can recover that information, then GAE's storage is the only good general way (memcache could expire from under you, for example). Not sure what you mean by "tables" (?!), but guessing that you actually mean GAE's storage the answer is "yes". (Under very specific circumstances you might want to put that data to some different place on the network, such as your visitor's browser e.g. via cookies, or an Amazon storage instance, etc, but it does not appear to me that those specific circumstances are appliable to your use case).