backend

In my previous post I talked about approach for Multiple Ticket feature’s user-interface [Link]. In this post I’ll discuss about Flask back-end used for saving multiple tickets.

HTML Fields Naming

Since the number of Tickets a user creates is unknown to the server, details of tickets were needed to be sent as an array of values. So the server would accept the list of values and iterate over them. To send data as an array the naming had to include brackets. Below are some input fields used in tickets:

<tr>
    <td>
        <input type="hidden" name="tickets[type]">
        <input type="text" name="tickets[name]" class="form-control" placeholder="Ticket Name" required="required" data-uniqueticket="true">
        <div class="help-block with-errors"></div>
    </td>
    <td>
        <input type="number" min="0" name="tickets[price]" class="form-control"  placeholder="$" value="">
    </td>
    <td>
        <input type="number" min="0" name="tickets[quantity]" class="form-control" placeholder="100" value="{{ quantity }}">
    </td>
    <!-- Other fields -->
</tr>

At the server

When the POST request reaches the server, any of the above fields (say tickets[name]) would be available as a list. The Flask Request object includes a form dictionary that contains all the POST parameters sent with the request. This dictionary is an ImmutableMultiDict object, which has a getlist method to get array of elements.

For instance in our case, we can get tickets[name] using:

@expose('/create', methods=('POST', 'GET'))
def create_view(self):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        ticket_names = request.form.getlist('tickets[name]')

    # other stuff

The ticket_names variable would contain the list of all the Ticket names sent with the request. So for example if the user created three tickets at the client-side, the form would possibly look like:

<form method="post">
  <!-- Ticket One -->
  <input type="text" name="tickets[name]" class="form-control" value="Ticket Name One">
  <!-- Ticket Two -->
  <input type="text" name="tickets[name]" class="form-control" value="Ticket Name Two">
  <!-- Ticket Three -->
  <input type="text" name="tickets[name]" class="form-control" value="Ticket Name Three">

</form>

After a successful POST request to the server, ticket_names should contain ['Ticket Name One', 'Ticket Name Two', 'Ticket Name Three'].

Other fields, like tickets[type], tickets[price], etc. can all be extracted from the Request object.

Checkbox Fields

A problem arose when a checkbox field was needed for every ticket. In my case, a “Hide Ticket” option was needed to let the user decide if he wants the ticket to be shown at the public Events page.

The problem with checkboxes is that, for a checkbox of a particular name attribute, if it is not selected, POST parameters of the request made by the client will not contain the checkbox input field parameter. So if I define an input field as a checkbox with the following naming convention, and make a POST request to the server, the server will receive blah[] parameter only if the input element had been checked.

<input type="checkbox" name="blah[]" >

This creates a problem for “Hide ticket” checkboxes. For instance, at the client-side the user creates three tickets with the first and last tickets having their checkboxes selected, the server would get an array of two.

<form>
  <!-- Ticket One -->
  <input type="checkbox" name="tickets[hide]" checked>
  <!-- Ticket Two -->
  <input type="checkbox" name="tickets[hide]">
  <!-- Ticket Three -->
  <input type="checkbox" name="tickets[hide]" checked>

</form>

ticket_hide_opts = request.form.getlist('tickets[hide]')

ticket_hide_opts would be an array of length two. And there is no way to tell what ticket had its “Hide ticket” option checked. So for the hide checkbox field I had to define input elements with unique names to extract them at the server.

There is also a hack to overcome the unchecked-checkbox problem. It is by using a hidden field with the same name as the checkbox. You can read about it here: http://www.alexandrejoseph.com/blog/2015-03-03-flask-unchecked-checkbox-value.html.