fletched 0.4.0

Tools to build flet apps with multiple views/routes

fletched

• fletched
  • routed-app
    • When will I need this?
    • How do I use this?
      • ViewBuilder class
      • Route assignment
      • Route protection
      • Aggregating ViewBuilder classes
      • RoutedApp usage
      • App state
  • mvp-utils
    • Architecture / API
    • Usage
      • View
      • Presenter
      • DataSource
      • Model
      • Validation / error handling

routed-app

When will I need this?

Say you want to design an app for a government agency with multiple, let's say 20+ pages (MPA = Multi Page Application). Since Flet is technically SPA (Single Page Application) only, you'll use views and some routing to simulate the MPA behaviour.

Not every person in the agency should be able to access every page/view. Also, they shouldn't be able to see anything but the login page until they're logged in. The roles defined in the OAuth token the app receives upon login will determine what pages/views a user has access to.

You'll probably want to design your app in a way that bundles every page/view into its own module. If you used an architecture design pattern (which you definitely should at this scale), obtaining the view requires building its model and presenter or controller as well and thus you need some function or method to obtain the view.

The way flet routing works ATM, a view will have to be recreated after a route change, so you'll want to match each route of your app to the function or method that creates the appropriate view for it. You'll also want the function/method to return a different view or raise an exception if the user is not authorized to access it. This can create a lot of boilerplate code if you don't have the help of a library.

Another library that might interest you if you are designing an app of that scale is flet-mvp-utils. It is designed to work well with flet-routed-app (e.g. the conveniently included MvpViewBuilder assumes usage of flet-mvp-utils), but neither of them requires usage of the other.

How do I use this?

ViewBuilder class

In the module of your page/view, create a file called (something like) build.py. In it, create a class called (something like) {page_name}ViewBuilder. This class should inherit from the ViewBuilder class of this library and at minimum define a method with the signature

def build_view(self, route_parameters: dict[str, str]) -> flet.View

This library also contains convenience ViewBuilder subclasses that provide a shortcut for common architecture design patterns. The MvpViewBuilder for example only requires you to define three class variables:

from flet_routed_app import MvpViewBuilder

from my_package.views.counter import CounterDataSource, CounterPresenter, CounterView


class CounterViewBuilder(MvpViewBuilder):
    data_source_class = CounterDataSource
    presenter_class = CounterPresenter
    view_class = CounterView

Route assignment

from flet_routed_app import MvpViewBuilder, route

from my_package.views.counter import CounterDataSource, CounterPresenter, CounterView

@route("/counter")
class CounterViewBuilder(MvpViewBuilder):
    data_source_class = CounterDataSource
    presenter_class = CounterPresenter
    view_class = CounterView

Route protection

from flet_routed_app import MvpViewBuilder, login_required, route

from my_package.views.counter import CounterDataSource, CounterPresenter, CounterView

@login_required
@route("/counter")
class CounterViewBuilder(MvpViewBuilder):
    data_source_class = CounterDataSource
    presenter_class = CounterPresenter
    view_class = CounterView

from flet_routed_app import MvpViewBuilder, group_required, route

from my_package.views.counter import CounterDataSource, CounterPresenter, CounterView

@group_required("demo")
@route("/counter")
class CounterViewBuilder(MvpViewBuilder):
    data_source_class = CounterDataSource
    presenter_class = CounterPresenter
    view_class = CounterView

You can also easily write your own auth decorator, all it has to do is define a function that returns a bool and set the auth_func attribute of the ViewBuilder class it wraps to that function.

Aggregating ViewBuilder classes

Somewhere in your project, you will have to import all ViewBuilder classes and aggregate them in a list. The recommended approach is to do this in the __init__.py of the module that contains all your view modules.

It is also possible to create multiple lists of different ViewBuilders in different places in your project and to then add these lists to the app one after another.

RoutedApp usage

In your main() function, create an instance of RoutedApp and add the previously imported list of ViewBuilder classes to the instance.

import flet as ft

from flet_routed_app import RoutedApp

from mypackage import views

def main(page: ft.Page):
    app = RoutedApp(page)
    app.add_view_builders(views.view_builders)

ft.app(target=main)

App state

You can share data between different pages/views by storing it in the state dictionary of the app instance and retrieving it from there.

state is a defaultdict; if a key does not exist, it will return the string Literal "not set".

Each ViewBuilder will be passed the app instance when it is added to that very instance.

If you know exactly which variables you will need to pass at runtime and you want to have autocomplete in your editor, you can create custom app and state classes in an app.py file like this:

from flet_routed_app import CustomAppState, RoutedApp


class AppState(CustomAppState):
    test: int = 0
    demo: str = ""


class App(RoutedApp):
    state: AppState = AppState()

Please remember to use those throughout your project when typehinting, otherwise you won't reap the autocomplete benefits.

CustomAppState is an empty dataclass which saves you the trouble of having to import dataclasses and decorate your class and ensures better type safety for the library.

You will also need to pass the custom_state=True flag when creating the app instance, so the constructor of RoutedApp knows not to set the state class variable to an empty defaultdict.

mvp-utils

This library provides tools that make it a bit easier to follow architecture patterns in your flet app that leverage on immutable models and unidirectional control flow. Those are mostly based on the Model-View-Presenter/MVP pattern, hence the name of the library. At this stage, it can be used to ease working with any model-based architecture pattern though.

Architecture / API

flowchart TB
    View-- "intent methods call handlers"-->Presenter
    Presenter-- pass new model to render-->View
    Presenter-- handle intent concretely -->DataSource
    DataSource-- notify of new model -->Presenter
    DataSource-- create from intended/resulting changes -->Model
    DataSource<-- query/modify according to intent -->DB/API/etc

One of the main goals of this library is to reduce the amount of boilerplate code that is needed in order to implement an MVP-based architecture for flet apps. This should however not come at the cost of typechecking and autocomplete. That is why for each class you will interact with, the general way of doing things stays the same:

class MyClass(LibraryClass):
    variable_needed_by_library_class_and_this_class: MyOtherClass

    def some_method(self):
        ...

This approach solves the following problem: In order to do their helpful work behind the scenes, the library classes need to access objects that the concrete subclasses receive or create, e.g. the DataSource in MvpPresenter implementations. MvpPresenter can only know that the DataSource is an instance of MvpDataSource, so a subclass accessing a self.data_source variable set in the parent class (how it is set is more or less irrelevant) would not know anymore than that and thus your IDE can't properly autocomplete for you anymore.

There is a bit of magic (namely abstract class properties and a bit of dataclass wizardry) going on behind the scenes that makes this work, but it should save you from ever having to write an __init__() method while still getting helpful autocomplete in MyClass for variable_needed_by_library_class_and_this_class, which itself will be autocompleted for you when defining MyClass. It also makes the approach more declarative rather than imperative, which some developers might prefer (or so I've heard).

If you feel you need this library to properly design your flet app, it is probably complex enough to need routing and maybe even an app state solution as well. Lucky for you, flet-routed-app and flet-mvp-utils are designed to compliment each other while none of both strictly requires usage of the other in order to work.

Usage

Say you have a form and want to validate the TextFields in it when a submit button is clicked.

View

Your view uses refs. The actual UI code may be located somewhere else and simply receive the refs and/or callbacks and return a component that is connected to the ref. When creating the view class, you inherit from MvpView and create a class variable named ref_map, containing a dictionary that maps the attribute names of your model to the respective ref of the control that should be tied to it. Any variable intended for the flet.View constructor will be accepted and passed on by the default __init__() method, so you don't need to define your own in most cases.

import flet as ft

from flet_mvp_utils import MvpView


class FormView(MvpView):
    ref_map = {
            "last_name": ft.Ref[ft.TextField](),
            "first_name": ft.Ref[ft.TextField](),
            "age": ft.Ref[ft.TextField](),
        }

    def some_intent_method(self, e) -> None:
        ...

MvpView has a render(model) method that takes a model and updates any refs' current value to the model value if they aren't the same. This method is supposed to be called in the callback you register with the DataSource, so that a changed model is immediately reflected in the view. As you will learn in the next section, this doesn't have to concern you as it can be done automatically.

Presenter

Any class that inherits from MvpPresenter updates the view automatically once it is notified of a model update. MvpPresenter is a dataclass and so should its subclasses be. This helps to reduce the amount of boilerplate code (specifically __init__() methods) you have to write and keeps the general API of this library consistent. Since both the DataSource and the View are known to it (because the subclass fields override the fields of the same name in the superclass), MvpPresenter will automatically register a method as a callback with the DataSource that renders the new model in the given view in its __post_init__() hook.

from dataclasses import dataclass
from flet_mvp_utils import MvpPresenter

from my_package.views.form import FormDataSource, FormViewProtocol


@dataclass
class FormPresenter(MvpPresenter):
    data_source: FormDataSource
    view: FormViewProtocol

    def some_intent_handling_method(self) -> None:
        ...

MvpPresenter also provides a generic build() method that simply calls the build(presenter) method of the view with itself as the sole argument. If you need a custom build method for your presenter, just override it with your own.

DataSource

The DataSource class, inheriting from MvpDataSource, is where the business logic of your component/virtual page will live. Since the latter inherits from Observable, brokers of any kind (presenter classes in MVP-based architectures) can register callback functions with your DataSource class that will be executed when you call self.notify_observers() in it. As mentioned above, subclasses of MvpPresenter do this for you automatically after you initialized them properly.

These callbacks are meant to be used to inform a presenter that a new, updated model has been created. Since creating new models to replace the current one is a rather repetitive and uniform task, MvpDataSource will do it for you. All you have to do is pass your model class to its constructor and call self.update_model_partial(changes: dict) or self.update_model_complete(new_model: dict) depending on your use case.

from flet_mvp_utils import MvpDataSource


class FormDataSource(MvpDataSource):
    current_model = FormModel()

    def some_method(self) -> None:
        ...

Model

The model is supposed to act as the state of your view. It should contain everything the view needs to know in order to render/update itself. This can be data from a database, an API, a config file or even just another component.

Your model inherits from MvpModel, which is an immutable pydantic BaseModel. This means you can write custom validators for each attribute and validate all your data whenever a new instance of the model is created.

The model is immutable to force good habits upon the ones using it. Good habits in this context means not to modify your current model anywhere but in your DataSource class as that should be the single source of truth. Of course immutability is never enforced 100% in python, but this should suffice.

from flet_mvp_utils import MvpModel


class FormModel(MvpModel):
    last_name: str = ""
    first_name: str = ""
    age: int = 0

Validation / error handling

Notice that age is an int, even though the ref we assigned to it earlier points to a TextField? That's no problem at all, you'll have to do no manual conversion. Pydantic will parse the text input into an int and raise an error if that fails. We probably want to inform our user though that they have input invalid data. To do this, we'll simply typehint age differently.

from flet_mvp_utils import ErrorMessage, MvpModel


class FormModel(MvpModel):
    last_name: str = ""
    first_name: str = ""
    age: ErrorMessage | int = 0

It's important to specify the narrower type (ErrorMessage) first, otherwise every error message would just say that the field is not an instance of ErrorMessage.

This is where the magic of the update_model methods of MvpDataSource comes to light. If the creation of a new model fails, e.g. because a user put "old" into the age TextField instead of a number, our DataSource will now catch this error, wrap its message in an ErrorMessage object and assign it to the age field of a new model that contains all changes, both the valid inputs and the error mesages. Multiple errors at once are no problem at all, each ErrorMessage will be assigned to the field that caused it.

Since we probably don't want to make any calls to a database, API etc. in that case, the update_model methods will return a bool to let you know if there was an error.

The subscribed observers will be notified either way and the model will thus be rendered. MvpView.render() will try to assign fields that are instances of ErrorMessage to the error_text property of the control that the associated ref points to. This means that you should only use this technique for model fields that are associated with controls that actually have that property, like TextField or Dropdown.