General Development Topics

Guidelines

  • Best practices from Two Scoops should be followed where applicable

  • To maintain consistency, app packages should be named without delimiting characters, e.g. projectroles and userprofile

  • It is recommended to add a “Projectroles dependency” comment when directly importing e.g. mixins or tags from the projectroles app

  • Hard-coded imports from apps other than projectroles should be avoided

    • Use the plugin structure instead

    • See the example_backend_app for an example

  • Using Bootstrap 4 classes together with SODAR specific overrides and extensions provided in projectroles.js is recommended

Common Helpers

Via the projectroles app, SODAR Core provides optional templates for aiding in maintaining common functionality and layout. Those are defined here.

App Setting API

For accessing and modifying app settings for project or site apps, you should use the AppSettingAPI. Below is an example of invoking the API. For the full API docs, see Projectroles Django API Documentation.

from projectroles.app_settings import AppSettingAPI
app_settings = AppSettingAPI()
app_settings.get_app_setting('app_name', 'setting_name', project_object)  # Etc..

Form Base Classes

Although not required, it is recommended to use common SODAR Core base classes with built-in helpers for your Django forms. SODARForm and SODARModelForm extend Django’s Form and ModelForm respectively. These base classes can be imported from projectroles.forms. Currently they add logging to add_error() calls, which helps administrators track form issues encountered by users. Further improvements are to be added in the future.

Pagination Template

A common template for adding navigation for list pagination can be found in projectroles/_pagination.html. This can be included to any Django ListView template which provides the paginate_by definition, enabling pagination. If a smaller layout is desired, the pg_small argument can be used. An example can be seen below:

{% include 'projectroles/_pagination.html' with pg_small=True %}

Using Icons

To use icons in your apps, use the iconify``class along with the collection and icon name into the ``data-icon attribute. See Iconify and django-iconify documentation for further information.

Example:

<i class="iconify" data-icon="mdi:home"></i>

Also make sure to modify the icon attribute of your app plugins to include the full collection:name syntax for Iconify icons.

In certain client side Javascript implementations in which icons are loaded or replaced dynamically, you may have to refer to these URLs as a direct img element:

<img src="/icons/mdi/home.svg" />

For modifiers such as color and size when using img tags, see here.

Testing

SODAR Core provides a range of ready made testing classes and mixins for different aspects of SODAR app testing, from user permissions to UI testing. See projectroles.tests for different base classes.

Test Settings

SODAR Core provides settings for configuring your UI tests, if using the base UI test classes found in projectroles.tests.test_ui. Default values for these settings can be found in config/settings/test.py. The settins are as follows:

  • PROJECTROLES_TEST_UI_CHROME_OPTIONS: Options for Chrome through Selenium. Can be used to e.g. enable/disable headless testing mode.

  • PROJECTROLES_TEST_UI_WINDOW_SIZE: Custom browser window size.

  • PROJECTROLES_TEST_UI_WAIT_TIME: Maximum wait time for UI test operations

  • PROJECTROLES_TEST_UI_LEGACY_LOGIN: If set True, use the legacy UI login and redirect function for testing with different users. This can be used if e.g. issues with cookie-based logins are encountered.