cubicweb-preview 1.2.3

Enables adding a preview button in your forms

General description

Preview cube adds the ability to preview the effect of a form submission.

The main idea is:

• submit the form data to a special controller, that will insert / update data in the database transaction, as normal

• generate the preview

• rollback the database changes to leave the database unchanged

The only exceptions to this rules are downloadable entities, like images : when an html page (as a preview example view) that contains newly created / updated images is rendered, the actual image content is queried by users’ browser a while after the above-mentionned database rollback was performed. The solution adopted in this cube is to save such contents on the disk, and keep it for some time (that can be set using the preview-time option) so that it can be previewed and clean it up afterwards.

Usage

Simplest usage concerns automatic entity forms, where you generally want to preview the just created or updated entity : in this case, import PreviewFormMixin from cubes.preview.utils and make your form inherit it : you’re done. For example, to apply it to all AutomaticEntityForm forms, use:

from cubicweb.selectors import yes
from cubicweb.web.views.autoform import AutomaticEntityForm
from cubes.preview.views.forms import PreviewFormMixin

class PreviewAutomaticEntityForm(PreviewFormMixin, AutomaticEntityForm):
    __select__ = AutomaticEntityForm.__select__ & yes()

You can of course customize the preview, using PreviewFormMixin preview_vid and preview_rql attributes, that will be used by the controller to create a result set (using preview_rql, if not None) and apply a view (which name is preview_vid value, default to “index”) to it.

Below is an example for a CubicWeb instance using the file and preview cubes, that can be used to preview the list of all images when you add or edit one : we request all images through the preview_rql setting and display them using the primary view

from cubicweb.selectors import is_instance
from cubicweb.web.views.autoform import AutomaticEntityForm
from cubes.preview.views.forms import PreviewFormMixin

class ImageForm(PreviewFormMixin, AutomaticEntityForm):
   __select__ = AutomaticEntityForm.__select__ & is_instance('Image')
   preview_vid = 'primary'
   preview_rql = 'Any X WHERE X is Image'
   preview_mode = 'inline'

Note that the previously created images are stored in the database while the previewed one is temporarily stored on disk. By default, the previewed image will be kept for one hour on disk, which can be set using the preview-store-time option.

The preview_mode attribute accepts newtab (the default, opening the preview in a new browser windows/tab within a custom template), or inline (will show the preview below the form).

Authors

This cube has been written by SecondWeb S.A.S. and is now maintained and developped by Logilab S.A.

License

This cube is distributed under the LGPL-2 license.