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
anduserprofile
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
- Hard-coded imports from apps other than
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 %}
Management Command Logger¶
When developing management commands for your apps, you may want to log certain
events while also ensuring relevant output is provided to the administrator
issuing a command. For this SODAR Core provides the
ManagementCommandLogger
class. It can be called like the standard Python
logger with shortcut commands such as info()
, debug()
etc. If you need
to access the actual Python logger being used, you can access it via
ManagementCommandLogger.logger
. Example of logger usage can be seen below.
from projectroles.management.logging import ManagementCommandLogger
logger = ManagementCommandLogger(__name__)
logger.info('Testing')
Note
The use of this logger class assumes your site sets up logging simlarly to
the example site and the SODAR Django Site template, including the use of a
LOGGING_LEVEL
Django settings variable.
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 operationsPROJECTROLES_TEST_UI_LEGACY_LOGIN
: If setTrue
, 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.
Base Test Classes and Helpers¶
For base classes and mixins with useful helpers, see the projectroles.tests
modules. The test cases also provide useful examples on how to set up your own
tests.
Note
For REST API testing, SODAR Core uses separate base test classes for the
internal SODAR Core API, and the API views implemented in the actual site
built on SODAR Core. For the API views in your site, make sure to test them
using e.g. TestAPIViewsBase
and not TestCoreAPIViewsBase
.
Debugging¶
Debugging helpers and tips are detailed in this section.
Profiling Middleware¶
SODAR Core provides a cProfile using profiler for tracing back sources of page
loading slowdowns. To enable the profiler middleware, include
projectroles.middleware.ProfilerMiddleware
in MIDDLEWARE
under your site
configuration. It is recommended to use a settings variable for this similar to
the example site configuration, where PROJECTROLES_ENABLE_PROFILING
controls
this.
Once enabled, adding the ?prof
query string attribute to and URL displays
the profiling information.