First of all, I'm very very new to web development (a few days), so I might say something that doesn't make sense.
I am writing a music web app using Django and I want to display a piano keyboard, have the user play some keys and then be able to retrieve this data (the notes the user played). I was able to embed the piano thanks to this, but I don't know how to get the data back. I tried wrapping the html key tags (<li class="key">...</li>) within a form tag and a submit bottom but I can't get it to work properly, and I'm not even sure if it's possible this way.
Then I realized, when you press some key, the tag's class changes from class="key" to class="key.active", so I was wondering if there is a way to detect these changes in the .html and thus be able to store the data. Does this even make sense? Maybe write a .py script to read the .html as a string and look for this changes? But does the .html file stored in the server change, or does it only change on the user's browser? I haven't found any info on the matter, which makes me think it might not be possible...
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I'm sorry if this is the wrong place for this, but I not exactly sure where is the right place to pose this issue.
I'm being asked to make a web page or spread sheet with a table of PDFs and add a button where each PDF can be attached to an email. As in, a one-click solution to add the actual PDF into an email, not a link to the file. I don't think this is possible since the file is hosted on the web... BUT...
If the file is hosted locally on our internal server is there a code or function that would be able to do that?
Basically, the company owner is old and doesn't want to have to search for files to add to emails. He wants to just be able to open a list (web, excel, whatever), click on the one(s) he wants, and have them add to an email. I need to be able to manage and update the PDF files on the back end and update the table.
Of course the easy thing is to have a shared folder, but it lacks organization of an easily readable table. Alternately, he want to attach the actual file, not send a link.
I can't think of a way to do this, but plenty of people are smarter than I.
And advice or help is appreciated.
Let me provide a little background.
An organization i am volunteering for delivers meals to people who are unable to come pick them up during the holidays.
They currently have a SQL Server DB that stores the information of all their clients along with the meal information for each year.
Currently a Java desktop application connects to the SQL Server DB and allows several functions to happen.
i.e. Add a client, add meals, remove clients, print delivery sheets.
I am hoping to use python Flask to rewrite the application as a web based application. The one function i am interested in at the moment is the print delivery sheets function.
The way this works is there is a setting for the current year. When you click the print deliveries for year button it will batch print a document for each customer onto an 8.5" x 11.5" paper. The sheet will be split in two with the same exact information on each side. This information includes the customer name, address, number of meals and so forth.
What i am wondering is how/what would be the best way to setup this template so that i could batch print it using python. I was thinking of creating an html template for the page but i am not sure how that would work.
Again i need to pass in every customer within that year into the template and batch print to 8.5" by 11.5" sheet.
What i am asking is.....
How could i create a template for the print that i can pass every customer two.
How would i print that template for every customer in a batch manner for every customer.
I was hoping to do this all in python if possible.
Thank you for your time and help.
If you are already deploying this as a web app, it will probably be easier to design and generate a pdf. You can use an html to pdf converter, which there are several of on PyPI, or there are plenty of resources online, such as:
How to convert webpage into PDF by using Python
https://www.smallsurething.com/how-to-generate-pdf-reports-with-jinja2-and-pyqt/
Once you have found a way to generate PDFs, you can then just use them like any other PDF, and either have the user download them or print them from the browser (this may require a little bit of Javascript, but this shouldn't be that hard since it should pretty much just be a window.open call.
For instance, you can add a button
<button onclick="getPDF()">Download PDF</button>
Which will then call a function called getPDF() which you define, which finds a way to generate the pdf.
function getPDF() {
// Find the uri for the pdf by some method
var urlToPdf = getUrlToPdf();
// Open PDF in new window
window.open(urlToPdf, "_blank");
}
Note Since you are using Flask, you can include the URL for the pdf in the source for the page, even the Javascript using the {{ }} syntax. Then the pdfs are only generated when someone requests that route.
This way you will not have to worry about connecting to a printer yourself at all, just use the browser to handle those kinds of tasks.
My problem is: I need to generate a csv file from the data I have in the database and then download it. Seems easy, but I cannot find a solution that will allow me to do it in the background so the user won't be redirected anywhere.
What I need is user clicking a button and the download starting immediately with the user staying on the same page. Something like a simple html download attribute, but with actually generating a file first. I cannot generate file in advance as the data changes all the time and I need to output the most recent version of it, also, user may specify some filters for the data, so I need to take it into account.
I use Django with Nginx as a production server. Django should always return a response, so I'm not sure I would be able to do what I want at all. Is there any different way to do it then?
I've searched for a long time, but unable to find anything similar to my request. Thanks everyone!
I have a webpage showing some data. I have a python script that continuously updates the data(fetches the data from database, and writes it to the html page).It takes about 5 minutes for the script to fetch the data. I have the html page set to refresh every 60 seconds using the meta tag. However, I want to change this and have the page refresh as soon as the python script updates it, so basically I need to add some code to my python script that refreshes the html page as soon as it's done writing to it.
Is this possible ?
Without diving into complex modern things like WebSockets, there's no way for the server to 'push' a notice to a web browser. What you can do, however, it make the client check for updates in a way that is not visible to the user.
It will involve writing Javascript & writing an extra file. When writing your main webpage, add, inside Javascript, a timestamp (Unix timestamp will be easiest here). You also write that same timestamp to a file on the web server (let's call it updatetime.txt). Using an AJAX request on the page, you pull in updatetime.txt & see if the number in the file is bigger than the number stored when you generate the document, refresh the page if you see an updated time. You can alter how 'instantly' the changes get noticed but controlling how quickly you poll.
I won't go into too much detail on writing the code but I'd probably just use $.ajax() from JQuery (even though it's sort of overkill for one function) to make the calls. The trick to putting something on a time in JS is setinterval. You should be able to find plenty of documentation on using both of them already written.
I have a page (located at /games/compare/) and it's a mini image comparison game. Users are shown two images and asked to pick between them in response to a question. This page can get images from the database, render a template with javascript and css inside and communicate back to the database using AJAX.
Now what if I wanted to embed this voting game onto the main page without duplicating any code? Ideally, I'd update the game and all the pages that "feature" the game will also reflect the changes.
I'm getting hung up on how to manage the assets for the entire site in a coherent and organized way. Some pages have css, javascript and I'm also using frameworks like bootstrap and a GIS framework.
Would I set the game up as a blueprint? How would I organize the assets (Javascript and CSS) so that there is no duplication?
Currently, I have a page rendering a template (main.html) which extends another (base.html). Base.html includes header.html, nav.html and footer.html with blocks set up for body and others.
My current approach is to strip everything out at the lowest level and reassemble it at a highest common level, which makes coding really slow. For instance, I have that voting game and right now it's located in a page called voting_game.html and has everything in it needed to play the game (full page html, styles and javascript included). Now if I want to include that game on another page, like the root index, the only solution I know of is to strip out the style, js and full page html from voting_game.html, leaving only the html necessary for the game to run. When I'm creating the index now, I'll import the html from voting_game.html but I'll separately have to import the style and javascript. This means I have to build every page twice, which is twice the work I need to be doing. This process also leaves little files all over the place, as I'm constantly refactoring and it makes development just a bookkeeping nightmare.
There has to be a way to do this and stay organized but I need your help understanding the best way to do this.
Thanks,
Phil
Edit: The embedded page should also be able to communicate with its parent page (the one it is being embedded into), or with other embedded pages within the same parent (children of a parent should be able to talk. So when someone plays the embedded game, they earn points, which should show up on another part other page, which would update reflecting the users current points.
This "Score board" would also be a separate widget/page/blueprint that can be embedded and will look for certain pieces of data in order to function.
To re-use a chunk of HTML, you can use Jinja's {% include %} tag. If that's too limiting, Jinja macros are also well suited. You can define your macros in a separate file and import them with {% import "path/to/macros.html" as my_macros %}.
Flask-Assets can help with the organisation of your assets.
As for using Blueprints, yes you should use them. But they mostly apply to Python code and HTML templates are organised in a different realm, so maybe their use is unrelated here.
You can't always remove all duplication though. If your game needs to affect three distant locations of the server-generated HTML, that's bits of template code to copy in every template that includes your game.