Web-Applications:TurboGears II

BCHB5242015

Lecture 26

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Last time…

We made the empty HoyaTaxa website and learned how to make minor changes, and send dynamic content to template.

We added a “taxa” information page with: Clickable Parent link (Variable number of) clickable Children links (Variable number of) names (other than sci name) Taxonomic lineage

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Start web-app and check

Check that the web-application is working... In the class Command-Line shell:

[student@localhost ~]$ cd HoyaTaxa [student@localhost HoyaTaxa]$ start-hoyataxa.py

Start a web-browser and access by urls:http://localhost:8080/http://localhost:8080/taxa/9606http://localhost:8080/taxa?taxid=9606

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Empty landing page

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Taxonomy page

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Tour the primary filesThe files we modified in the HoyaTaxa folder: Controller:

hoyataxa/controllers.py Change the index method Add the taxa method to lookup and return Taxonomy given taxid

(Data) Model: hoyataxa/model.py

SQLObject classes devdata.sqlite

download (or populate) the data in the sqlite database View / Template:

hoyataxa/templates/welcome.html Remove all but the dynamic title

hoyataxa/templates/master.html Change header and footer, remove menus

hoyataxa/templates/taxa.html Set-up the taxa page layout

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Empty landing page

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Set up search form

In controllers.py, define a class for the formfrom turbogears import validate, validatorsfrom turbogears import widgets, error_handler

class SearchFields(widgets.WidgetsList):    query = widgets.TextField(label="Search Term")    mode = widgets.SingleSelectField(label="Search Mode",                                     options=["Starts with",                                              "Ends with",                                              "Contains"],                                     default="Contains")

search_form = widgets.TableForm(    fields = SearchFields(),    action = "search",    submit_text = "Search"    )

class Root(controllers.RootController):    @expose(template="hoyataxa.templates.welcome")    def index(self):        return dict(form=search_form,                    title="All your taxa are belong to us")

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Set up search form

Place the form in welcome.html

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Set up search form

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Handle the search request

In controllers.py, we add the search method

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Handle the search request

Save taxa.html as search.html and modify

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Handle the search request

Save taxa.html as search.html and modify

Search for name: gorilla

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But…

There is a problem. What to do about bad input?

Too short, spaces at beginning or end…

TurboGears provides validators to check values in the fields to make sure they are OK

Nice integration with form widgets Users get error messages so they can fix the

error

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Validation “Schema”

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Handle errors in search parameters

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Problem is communicated to user

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Problem is communicated to user

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Validators can be quite complicated

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Problem is communicated to user

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Setup for use by web-services

Our web-site can now be accessed programatically… …as we did with urllib.urlopen in python

Access:http://localhost:8080/taxa?taxid=9606

http://localhost:8080/search?query=hum&mode=Contains

However, we usually don’t want to parse HTML. Programs want to parse “easy” no-frills formats.

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Let’s provide XML output format

We need a new output template for search: searchxml.html

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XML output format

Next we need to tell the search method when to use it…

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XML Output Format

To get XML format output, add “&tg_format=xml” to end of URL.

Try it:

http://localhost:8080/search?query=hum&mode=Contains

http://localhost:8080/search?query=hum&mode=Contains&tg_format=xml

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Similarly for the taxa page

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Similarly for the taxa page

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XML Output Format

To get XML format output, add “tg_format=xml” to end of URL.

Try it:

http://localhost:8080/taxa?taxid=9606http://localhost:8080/taxa?taxid=9606&tg_format=xml

http://localhost:8080/taxa/9606http://localhost:8080/taxa/9606?tg_format=xml

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All done…

We can now display a taxonomy record nicely if the user types a URL ...and then navigate about its heirachy.

Can search the names based on a user query. Search form, list of matching results, etc...

XML output for web-services.

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TODO…

If only one matching search result – jump straight to taxa page… Even if only one taxa matches?

Search/lookup by taxid too? Make pages and tables prettier

Center and position tables on page Alternate row colors