I’ve been slowed down in my progress this month due to a family vacation and a change of jobs, so I’ve only made a little progress on the KidsTasks app.
This post gets the app up to the ‘almost functional’ stage where the admin portal can be used to create tasks and schedules and the normal app UI can be used to list the day’s tasks, all of the tasks, and to mark tasks complete (or incomplete). It’s not a great idea to have the admin pages be the main data entry access, but for this early stage it will be sufficient.
All of this functionality needs some more work, but the basics are there, which is always a good time to stop and consider your design. Especially when I’m learning a new language or technology, I find that iterative design works best for the first several projects. Once you get your hands dirty, it’s easier to see what the next step should be. This doesn’t often (some would say ‘rarely’) ends up with an optimal design, but it gives you more room to experiment and learn as you go. That’s definitely what’s going to happen here, as I already have several changes in mind.
What Changed This Time
While working on the very simple views and templates, I decided that some simplification of the models was also in order. The models went from two different types of tasks existing in to different types of schedules. The different schedule types got removed and a new field got added to the Kid model to hold a list of DateTasks.
The basic issue driving this (which would have been obvious to many designers) was the ability to change “abstract tasks” (i.e. ‘practice piano every Tuesday’ into DateTasks (“It’s Tuesday today, get a list of all tasks that are due today and display them.”). The quick answer to this was to create the new list of DateTasks in the Kid model. This will store all of the tasks due today. This is really just a stepping stone to where I want to end up, having a history of completed (and non-completed) tasks.
Once I got this change to the models in place (complete with several rounds of rebuilding the database), I moved on to getting a most basic of user interfaces in place. To do this I hacked my way through learning the basics of accessing the Django ORM from views and templates. While this is fairly well documented, it still took some playing with to get where I was going and get the proper syntax.
I ended up doing most of my hacking in the views.py file and that’s where I put the main function to convert the Tasks to DateTasks. In the subsequent week since I wrote that, I’ve read (in Two Scoops of Django) that putting logic in your views is not the best practice, so the next revision will likely fix this and put that functionality into the model.
The Templates and Views
There’s really not all that much to the new views once you see the code. One thing that stood out for me was the simplicity of the Update view function. Being able to do a redirect “by magic” is pretty cool and produces a nice effect in the UI.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a graphic designer, but I do have intentions of creating something a little nicer than it currently stands: a simple HTML list with links to change the state of each task.
Cleanup
On a final note, I had to rebuild my laptop a few months ago and in the process I managed to forget to reinstall flake8! I finally noticed this and now my vim setup is marking all the errors it found. These got cleaned up on this round as well.
The next set of work on KidsTasks is to get a little nicer UI and to add some views for creating tasks instead of relying on the clunky admin portal. This might or might not entail a dive into class-based-views.
For those of you keeping score at home, the code at this state is in branch: blog/03-Simple-Views-Update in this repo: git@github.com:jima80525/KidTasks.git
Thanks for reading!