CRUDLFA+ Tutorial

About document

This document attempts to teach the patterns you can use, and at the same time go through every feature. The document strives to teach CRUDLFA+ as efficiently as possible. If it becomes too long, we will see how we refactor the document, until then, it serves as main documentation. Please contribute any modification you feel this document needs to fit its purpose.

About module

CRUDLFA+ strives to provide a modern UI for Django generic views out of the box, but all defaults should also be overiddable as conveniently as possible. It turns out that Django performs extremely well already, and pushing Django’s philosophy such as DRY as far as possible works very well for me.

Enable in your project

We’re going to setup TEMPLATES and INSTALLED_APPS before we begin.

Note

We will review the minimal settings in this tutorial, but you can consult the default settings available for your crudlfap version in the settings module.

TEMPLATES

CRUDLFA+ uses Jinja2 templates with a quite extended configuration. Options to enable them are using any of these in your settings:

INSTALLED_APPS

CRUDLFA+ leverages apps from the Django ecosystem. Use crudlfap.settings.CRUDLFAP_TEMPLATE_BACKEND. To help make this a pleasant experience, CRUDLFAP+ splits the INSTALLED_APPS setting into multiple settings you can import and mix together:

Define a Router

Register a CRUD with default views using Router.register()

Just add a crudlfap.py file in one of your installed apps, and the DefaultConfig will autodiscover them, this example shows how to enable the default CRUD for a custom model:

from crudlfap import shortcuts as crudlfap

from .models import Artist


crudlfap.Router(
    Artist,
    fields='__all__',
).register()

In this case, the Router will get the views it should serve from the CRUDLFAP_VIEWS setting.

Custom view parameters with View.clone()

If you want to specify views in the router:

.. literalinclude:: ../src/crudlfap_example/song/crudlfap.py

Using the clone() classmethod will define a subclass on the fly with the given attributes.

URLs

The easiest configuration is to generate patterns from the default registry:

from crudlfap import shortcuts as crudlfap

urlpatterns = [
    crudlfap.site.urlpattern
]

Or, to sit in /admin:

crudlfap.site.urlpath = 'admin'

urlpatterns = [
    crudlfap.site.urlpattern,
    # your patterns ..
]

Changing home page

CRUDLFA+ so far relies on Jinja2 and provides a configuration where it finds templates in app_dir/jinja2.

As such, a way to override the home page template is to create a directory “jinja2” in one of your apps - personnaly i add the project itself to INSTALLED_APPS, sorry if you have hard feelings about it but i love to do that, have a place to put project-specific stuff in general - and in the jinja2 directory create a crudlfap/home.html file.

You will also probably want to override crudlfap/base.html. But where it gets more interresting is when you replace the home view with your own. Example, still in urls.py:

from crudlfap import shortcuts as crudlfap
from .views import Dashboard  # your view

crudlfap.site.title = 'Your Title'  # used by base.html
crudlfap.site.urlpath = 'admin'  # example url prefix
crudlfap.site.views['home'] = views.Dashboard

urlpatterns = [
    crudlfap.site.get_urlpattern(),
]

So, there’d be other ways to acheive this but that’s how i like to do it.