django-intercooler_helpers

Author:	Keryn Knight
Version:	0.2.0

Release	Status
stable (0.2.0)
master

Sections

• What it does
• Installation and usage
  • Installation
  • Configuration
  • Usage
• Supported Django versions
  • Running the tests
  • Running the demo
• Contributing
• Roadmap
• The license

What it does

intercooler_helpers is a small reusable app for Django which provides a few improvements for working with Intercooler.js.

It providea a middleware which extracts relevant Intercooler.js data from the querystring, and attaches it to the request as a separate QueryDict (ie: it behaves like request.POST or request.GET)

It also provides a small middleware for changing request method based on either the query string (_method=PUT) or a request header(X-HTTP-Method-Override: PUT)

Between them, they should capture all the incoming Intercooler.js data on which the server may act.

Installation and usage

This application depends on django-intercoolerjs which provides a copy of Intercooler.js bundled up for use with the standard Django staticfiles application.

Installation

You can grab 0.2.0 from PyPI like so:

pip install django-intercooler-helpers==0.2.0

Or you can grab it from GitHub like this:

pip install -e git+https://github.com/kezabelle/django-intercoolerjs-helpers.git#egg=django-intercoolerjs-helpers

Configuration

You need to add intercooler_helpers.middleware.IntercoolerData to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES (or MIDDLEWARE on Django 1.10+).

You may optionally want to add intercooler_helpers.middleware.HttpMethodOverride as well, if you don't already have a method by which to fake the HTTP Method change. If you're using <meta name="intercoolerjs:use-actual-http-method" content="true"/> then you don't need HttpMethodOverride at all.

To install all the middleware, you want something like:

# MIDDLEWARE = ... for newer Django
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
  # ...
  'intercooler_helpers.middleware.HttpMethodOverride',
  'intercooler_helpers.middleware.IntercoolerData',
  'intercooler_helpers.middleware.IntercoolerRedirector',
  # ...
)

HttpMethodOverride and IntercoolerData ought to be near the top of the iterable, as they both make use of process_request(request). IntercoolerRedirector ought to be near the bottom, as it operates on process_response(request, response) and you probably want to convert the response to a client-side redirect at the earliest opportunity.

Usage

A brief overview of the public API provided so far:

IntercoolerData

For fully correct detection of Intercooler.js requests, you can call request.is_intercooler(). Behind the scenes, it uses request.maybe_intercooler() to detect whether ic-request was present, indicating it may have been a valid Intercooler.js request, and also checks request.is_ajax()

To parse the Intercooler-related data out of the query-string, you can use request.intercooler_data (not a method!) which is a QueryDict and should behave exactly like request.GET - It pulls all of the ic-* keys out of request.GET and puts them in a separate data structure, leaving your request.GET cleaned of extraenous data.

request.intercooler_data is a lazy data structure, like request.user, so will not modify request.GET until access is attempted.

The following properties exist, mapping back to the keys mentioned in the Intercooler.js Reference document

• request.intercooler_data.url returns a namedtuple containing
  • returns the ic-current-url (converted via urlparse) or None
  • A Django ResolverMatch pointing to the view which made the request (based on ic-current-url) or None
• request.intercooler_data.element returns a namedtuple containing
  • ic-element-name or None
  • ic-element-id or None
• request.intercooler_data.id
  • the ic-id which made the request. an ever-incrementing integer.
• request.intercooler_data.request
  • a boolean indicating that it was an Intercooler.js request. Should always be true if request.is_intercooler() said so.
• request.intercooler_data.target_id
  • ic-target-id or None
• request.intercooler_data.trigger returns a namedtuple containing
  • ic-trigger-name or None
  • ic-trigger-id or None
• request.intercooler_data.prompt_value
  • If no ic-prompt-name was given and a prompt was used, this will contain the user's response. Appears to be undocumented?

HttpMethodOverride

• request.changed_method is a boolean indicating that the request was toggled from being a POST to something else (one of GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, OPTIONS ... though why you'd want to POST and have it act as a GET is beyond me. But that's your choice)
• request.original_method if either _method=X or X-HTTP-Method-Override: X caused the request to change method, then this will contain the original request. It should always be POST
• request.method will reflect the desired HTTP method, rather than the one originally used (POST)

IntercoolerRedirector

If a redirect status code is given (> 300, < 400), and the request originated from Intercooler.js (assumes IntercoolerData is installed so that request.is_intercooler() may be called), remove the Location header from the response, and create a new HttpResponse with all the other headers, and also the X-IC-Redirect header to indicate to Intercooler.js that it needs to do a client side-redirect.

Supported Django versions

The tests are run against Django 1.8 through 1.10, and Python 2.7, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5.

Running the tests

If you have a cloned copy, you can do:

python setup.py test

If you have tox, you can just do:

tox

Running the demo

A barebones demo is provided. It assumes you're using something like virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper but you can probably figure it out otherwise:

mktmpenv --python=`which python3`
pip install -e git+https://github.com/kezabelle/django-intercooler-helpers.git#egg=django-intercooler-helpers

Then probably:

cd src/django-intercooler-helpers
python demo_project.py runserver

It shows off a few of the same demos that the Intercooler.js website does.

Contributing

Please do!

The project is hosted on GitHub in the kezabelle/django-intercooler-helpers repository.

Bug reports and feature requests can be filed on the repository's issue tracker.

If something can be discussed in 140 character chunks, there's also my Twitter account.

Roadmap

TODO.

The license

It's FreeBSD. There's should be a LICENSE file in the root of the repository, and in any archives.