I have a general question about how people manage "reusable apps" in the web app world. Let me give an example of what I am encountering, maybe those of you with experience can comment.
I'm developing an app that is a task management app. IE, an engineering manger creates tasks, spawns them off to engineers, engineers generate results, record those results in the app and the manager sits in a meeting and quickly runs through the tasks (displayed by my webapp, updated by the engineers and managers), fand igures out "what's next", creating new tasks on the fly. I've recently integrated Eric Florenzano's threaded comments app into my app (thanks much to Eric!). So far I've kept the threaded threadedcomments functionality fairly decoupled from my own "taskmanager" app. For example, when the user adds a comment the post goes to a URL that is defined in threadedcomments/urls.py, and then gets sent the views.py function in threadecomments/views.py code. However, as I've continued developing my UI, I'm finding that it is hard to keep them so decoupled. For example, one of the html pages rendered to my users is similar to the django admin changelist. It shows a filtered set of tasks and for each task shows a very brief horizontal summary of the most important aspects of the task (task name, owner, deadline, etc.). Now that I have this nice comment app I find that I want the user to be able to easly view the most recent comment associated with the task. No problem there. In my "changelist" view I now display a "date modified" column, and in that column I render the date of the last comment. When the user mouses over that date, they get a jquery "cluetip" (tooltip) that contains the most recent comment. All good. However, the next thing I realize I now need is the ability to sort on that column . So therein lies the problem. All other columns can be easily sorted on using order_by() because they are fields in my Task model. But the date of the last comment is not. I can of course create a field in my Task object that records the date of a comment whenever a comment is added, but since a comment is added via a threadecomments/views.py function, that would mean doing one of the following: * modify the threadedcomments views.py code that receives the POST for a new comment, and make it just know about my Task model (and save the comment date and perhaps a id for the last comment in my Task model). * modify the threadedcomments views.py code to take a callback function as an argument - that callback function could do my Task specific stuff as described above, but this would keep it more encapsulated within my Task app (but of course I would still have to modify threadecomments to take the callback arg) * give up on using the threadedcomments views.py function that creates a new comment, and just do the same stuff in my Task app (ie, handle the POST of a new comment), using the models specified by threadedcomment, but also saving the date and id of last comment in my Task object. * Do my sort ordering with something more custom than the standard order_by() - ie, something that looks at the date of the last ThreadedComment object that is associated with the task. I'm sure there must be a way to do this, but I'm concerned it could be very slow, not sure though, perhaps there is sql magic I could do. I can see other times when I will have similar problems, as well. For example, when a task is added, I would like the user to be able to add a comment along with the other data - this seems like it cause a similar problem. I already have a "task add" form - so it seems that I need to integrate the comment into my own form, which means I'd have to deal with creation of that comment within my own views.py code, and not just rely on the views.py in the threadedcomments app. My goal is to have clean and reusable code, follow DRY principles, etc.. I'd like to be able to integrate a new version of threadedcomments into my app, if it becomes available, but I'm concerned that I'm proceeding down a path that will make that difficult, so I'm curious if any of you with lots of web app experience can lend any insights toward the best way to manage this sort of issue. Sorry for the long post here. Hopefully this is an interesting topic to some of you out there! Margie --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
