Responsive UI: Modifying Designs with Device Width

An important feature of websites these days with the advancement of smartphones is being responsive with device size. We nowadays not only worry about the various width of laptop or desktop, which don’t vary by a huge amount but also need to worry about tablets and phones which have a much lesser width. The website’s UI should not break and should be as easy to use on phones as it is on desktops/laptops. Using frameworks like bootstraps, Semantic-UI solves this problem to a large extent. But what if we need to modify certain parts by our own in case of mobile devices? How do we do that?

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Building interactive elements with HTML and javascript: Resizing

{ Repost from my personal blog @ https://blog.codezero.xyz/building-interactive-elements-with-html-and-javascript-resizing }

Unlike draggable, HTML/js does not provide us with a direct spec for allowing users to graphically resize HTML DOM elements. So, we’ll be using mouse events and pointer locations to achieve the ability of resizing.

We’ll start with a box div.

<div id="box">  
    <div>Resize me !</div>
</div>  

A little bit of CSS magic to make it look a little bit better and square.

#box {
    position: relative;
    width: 130px;
    height: 130px;
    background-color: #2196F3;
    color: white;
    display:flex;
    justify-content:center;
    align-items:center;
    border-radius: 10px;
}

Now, we need a handle element. The user will be using this handle element to drag and resize the box.

<div id="box">  
    <div>Resize me !</div>
    <div id="handle">
    </div>
</div>  

Now, we just have an invisible div. Let’s give it some color, make it square. We also have to position it at one corner of the box.

#handle {
    background-color: #727272;
    width: 10px;
    height: 10px;
    cursor: se-resize;
    position:absolute;
    right: 0;
    bottom: 0;
}

The parent div#box has the CSS property position: relative and by setting div#handle the property position:absolute, we have the ability to position the handle absolutely with respect to its parent.

Also, note the cursor: se-resize property. This instructs the browser to set the cursor to the resize cursor () when the user is over it.

Now, it’s upto to javascript to take over. :wink:

var resizeHandle = document.getElementById('handle');  
var box = document.getElementById('box');  

For resizing, the user would click on the handle and drag it. So, we need to start resizing the moment the user presses and holds on the handle. Let’s setup a function to listen for the mousedown event.

resizeHandle.addEventListener('mousedown', initialiseResize, false);  

the initialiseResize function should do two things:

  1. Resize the box every time the mouse pointer moves.
  2. Listen for mouseup event so that the event listeners can be removed as soon as the user is done resizing.
function initialiseResize(e) {  
    window.addEventListener('mousemove', startResizing, false);
    window.addEventListener('mouseup', stopResizing, false);
}
function startResizing(e) {  
    // Do resize here
}
function stopResizing(e) {  
    window.removeEventListener('mousemove', startResizing, false);
    window.removeEventListener('mouseup', stopResizing, false);
}

To resize the box according to the user’s mouse pointer movements, we’ll be taking the current x and y coordinates of the mouse pointer (in pixels) and change the box’s height and width accordingly.

function startResizing(e) {  
   box.style.width = (e.clientX) + 'px';
   box.style.height = (e.clientY) + 'px';
}

e.clientX gives the mouse pointer’s X coordinate and e.clientY gives the mouse pointer’s Y coordinate

Now, this works. But this would only work as expected if the box is placed in the top-left corner of the page. We’ll have to compensate for the box’s left and top offsets. (position from the left and top edges of the page)

function startResizing(e) {  
   box.style.width = (e.clientX - box.offsetLeft) + 'px';
   box.style.height = (e.clientY - box.offsetTop) + 'px';
}

There you go :smile: We can now resize the box !

https://jsfiddle.net/niranjan94/w8k1ffju/embedded

Continue ReadingBuilding interactive elements with HTML and javascript: Resizing

Paginated APIs in Flask

Week 2 of GSoC I had the task of implementing paginated APIs in Open Event project. I was aware that DRF provided such feature in Django so I looked through the Internet to find some library for Flask. Luckily, I didn’t find any so I decided to make my own.

A paginated API is page-based API. This approach is used as the API data can be very large sometimes and pagination can help to break it into small chunks. The Paginated API built in the Open Event project looks like this –

{
    "start": 41,
    "limit": 20,
    "count": 128,
    "next": "/api/v2/events/page?start=61&limit=20",
    "previous": "/api/v2/events/page?start=21&limit=20",
    "results": [
    	{
    		"data": "data"
    	},
    	{
    		"data": "data"
    	}
    ]
}

Let me explain what the keys in this JSON mean –

  1. start – It is the position from which we want the data to be returned.
  2. limit – It is the max number of items to return from that position.
  3. next – It is the url for the next page of the query assuming current value of limit
  4. previous – It is the url for the previous page of the query assuming current value of limit
  5. count – It is the total count of results available in the dataset. Here as the ‘count’ is 128, that means you can go maximum till start=121 keeping limit as 20. Also when you get the page with start=121 and limit=20, 8 items will be returned.
  6. results – This is the list of results whose position lies within the bounds specified by the request.

Now let’s see how to implement it. I have simplified the code to make it easier to understand.

from flask import Flask, abort, request, jsonify
from models import Event

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/api/v2/events/page')
def view():
	return jsonify(get_paginated_list(
		Event, 
		'/api/v2/events/page', 
		start=request.args.get('start', 1), 
		limit=request.args.get('limit', 20)
	))

def get_paginated_list(klass, url, start, limit):
    # check if page exists
    results = klass.query.all()
    count = len(results)
    if (count < start):
        abort(404)
    # make response
    obj = {}
    obj['start'] = start
    obj['limit'] = limit
    obj['count'] = count
    # make URLs
    # make previous url
    if start == 1:
        obj['previous'] = ''
    else:
        start_copy = max(1, start - limit)
        limit_copy = start - 1
        obj['previous'] = url + '?start=%d&limit=%d' % (start_copy, limit_copy)
    # make next url
    if start + limit > count:
        obj['next'] = ''
    else:
        start_copy = start + limit
        obj['next'] = url + '?start=%d&limit=%d' % (start_copy, limit)
    # finally extract result according to bounds
    obj['results'] = results[(start - 1):(start - 1 + limit)]
    return obj

Just to be clear, here I am assuming you are using SQLAlchemy for the database. The klass parameter in the above code is the SqlAlchemy db.Model class on which you want to query upon for the results. The url is the base url of the request, here ‘/api/v2/events/page’ and it used in setting the previous and next urls. Other things should be clear from the code.

So this was how to implement your very own Paginated API framework in Flask (should say Python). I hope you found this post interesting.

Until next time.

Ciao

 

{{ Repost from my personal blog http://aviaryan.in/blog/gsoc/paginated-apis-flask.html }}

Continue ReadingPaginated APIs in Flask

Open Event Organizer’s Server: Custom Forms

As we know, open event organizer’s server provides a means of creating events. And an important part of events is sessions and speakers of sessions. But different events have different details required for sessions and speakers of sessions. Some might feel that only Name and Email-ID of speaker is enough, while others may require their Github, Facebook, etc. links. So the best way to solve this is to make a custom form so that the organizers get to select what all fields they want in the forms. But how to do this? Well, thanks to JSON

In the Step-5 of Event Creation Wizards, we have option (or switches) to include and require various fields available for the session form and speaker form for applying in a particular Session Form. Here is how it looks:
custom_form.png

As we can see, each field has 2 options – Include and Require. On clicking the Include switch the Require switch is enabled through jQuery. The Include switch means that the field is included in the form while the Require switch signifies that the field will be a compulsory field in the form.

Storing Options

We create a javascript array containing a single object. This object in turn is made up of objects with field names as keys and another object as value. This object in turn contains the keys include and require. The value of include and require is 0 by default. On selecting, their value is changed to 1. An example structure of the array is like:

[{
    "title": {
        "include": 1,
        "require": 1
    },
    "subtitle": {
        "include": 0,
        "require": 0
    },
    "short_abstract": {
        "include": 1,
        "require": 0
    },
    "long_abstract": {
        "include": 0,
        "require": 0
    },
    "comments": {
        "include": 1,
        "require": 0
    },
    "track": {
        "include": 0,
        "require": 0
    },
    "session_type": {
        "include": 0,
        "require": 0
    },
    "language": {
        "include": 0,
        "require": 0
    },
    "slides": {
        "include": 1,
        "require": 0
    },
    "video": {
        "include": 0,
        "require": 0
    },
    "audio": {
        "include": 0,
        "require": 0
    }
}]

This array is then converted to string format using JSON.stringify, submitted through form and stored in database in the form of a string.

Rendering Forms

Now, we have already stored the options as selected by the organizer. But now we need to render the forms based on the JSON string stored in the database. Firstly, in the server side we convert the string to JSON object in python using json.loads . Then we send these JSON objects to the templates.

In the templates, we create form elements based on the values of the include and require of each form element. A sample element HTML is like this:

Screenshot from 2016-06-17 22:38:40

We use a loop to iterate over the JSON object and thus add the elements which have  “include = 1”  . The final form looks something like this:

session-form

Continue ReadingOpen Event Organizer’s Server: Custom Forms

Errors and Error handlers for REST API

Errors are an essential part of a REST API system. Error instances must follow a particular structure so the client developer can correctly handle them at the client side. We had set a proper error structure at the beginning of creating REST APIs. It’s as follows:

{
    "error": {
        "message": "Error description",
        "code": 400
    }
}

Any error occurring during client server communication would follow the above format. Code is the returned status code and message is a brief description of the error. To raise an error we used an _error_abort() function which was an abstraction over Flask-RESTplus abort(). We defined an error structure inside _error_abort() and passed it to abort().

def _error_abort(code, message):
    error = {
        'code': code,
        'message': message,
    }
    abort(code, error=error)

This method had its limitations. Since the error handlers were not being overidden, only errors raised through _error_abort() had the defined structure. So if an Internal Server error occurred, the returned error response wouldn’t follow the format.

To overcome this, we wrote our own exceptions for errors and created error handlers to handle them. We first made the response structure more detailed, so the client developer can understand what kind of error is being returned.

{
    "error": {
        "code": 400,
        "message": "'name' is a required parameter",
        "status": "INVALID_FIELD",
        "field": "name"
    }
}

The above is an example of a validation error.

The “status” key helps making the error more unique. For example we use 400 status code for both validation errors and invalid service errors (“Service not belonging to said event”). But both have different statuses: “INVALID_FIELD” and “INVALID_SERVICE”.

The “field” key is only useful in the case validation errors, where it names the field that did not pass the validation. For other errors it remains null.

I first documented what kind of errors we would need.

Code Status Field Description
401 NOT_AUTHORIZED null Invalid token or user not authenticated
400 INVALID_FIELD “field_name” Missing or invalid field
400 INVALID_SERVICE null Service ID mentioned in path does not belong to said Event
404 NOT_FOUND null Event or Service not found
403 PERMISSION_DENIED null User role not allowed to perform such action
500 SERVER_ERROR null Internal server error

Next part was creating exception classes for each one these. I created a base error class that extended the python Exception class.

class BaseError(Exception):
    """Base Error Class"""

    def __init__(self, code=400, message='', status='', field=None):
        Exception.__init__(self)
        self.code = code
        self.message = message
        self.status = status
        self.field = field

    def to_dict(self):
        return {'code': self.code,
                'message': self.message,
                'status': self.status,
                'field': self.field, }

The to_dict() method would help when returning the response in error handlers.

I then extended this base class to other error classes. Here are three of them:

class NotFoundError(BaseError):
    def __init__(self, message='Not found'):
        BaseError.__init__(self)
        self.code = 404
        self.message = message
        self.status = 'NOT_FOUND'


class NotAuthorizedError(BaseError):
    def __init__(self, message='Unauthorized'):
        BaseError.__init__(self)
        self.code = 401
        self.message = message
        self.status = 'NOT_AUTHORIZED'


class ValidationError(BaseError):
    def __init__(self, field, message='Invalid field'):
        BaseError.__init__(self)
        self.code = 400
        self.message = message
        self.status = 'INVALID_FIELD'
        self.field = field

I then defined the error handlers for the api:

@api.errorhandler(NotFoundError)
@api.errorhandler(NotAuthorizedError)
@api.errorhandler(ValidationError)
@api.errorhandler(InvalidServiceError)
def handle_error(error):
    return error.to_dict(), getattr(error, 'code')

For overriding the default error handler, Flask-RESTplus let’s you create one with the same decorator, but without passing and argument to it.

@api.errorhandler
def default_error_handler(error):
    """Returns Internal server error"""
    error = ServerError()
    return error.to_dict(), getattr(error, 'code', 500)

I had set the default error to be the internal server error.

class ServerError(BaseError):
    def __init__(self, message='Internal server error'):
        BaseError.__init__(self)
        self.code = 500
        self.message = message
        self.status = 'SERVER_ERROR'

Now raising any of these error classes would activate the error handlers and a proper response would be sent to the client.

Continue ReadingErrors and Error handlers for REST API

Why should you use Heroku?

Last week I’ve dedicated most time to implement new heroku features to Open Event. Due to the fact that wasn’t easy tasks I can share my experience.

What is heroku?

Heroku is a cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages like Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go

Easy to deploy

what you need to do:

  1. Create account on heroku
  2. Download a heroku toolbelt to your enviroment.
  3. Go to your project directory(/open-event-orga-server)
  4. Sign in to heroku in your command line using your credentials
    $ heroku login
  5. Create app with name $
    heroku apps:create your_app_name

    after execution above command you will recive a link to your application

    http://your_app_name.herokuapp.com/
  6. Push latest changes to heroku
    $ git push heroku master
  7. If everythings is ok you can check results http://your_app_name.herokuapp.com/ (sometimes it does not work like we want 🙁 )

Easy to configure

To list/set/get config variables use:

$ heroku config
$ heroku config:set YOUR_VARIABLE=token123
$ heroku config:get YOUR_VARIABLE

or you can go to you application dashboard and make above operations

How you can get access to this variables using python langauges?

$ python

Python 2.7.10 (default, Oct 23 2015, 19:19:21) 

[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 7.0.0 (clang-700.0.59.5)] on darwin

Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>> import os

>>> your_variable  = os.environ.get('YOUR_VARIABLE', None)

>>> print your_variable
token123

I’ve used this to display current release in my python application(You need to generate a special API token and add it to config variables)

os.popen('curl -n https://api.heroku.com/apps/open-event/releases -H 
"Authorization: Bearer ' + token + '" -H 
"Accept: application/vnd.heroku+json; version=3"').read()

Easy to monitor

If something is wrong with your APP you need to use this command

$ heroku logs

it shows all logs

To see 10 latest releases use:

$ heroku releases

How you can set up Open Event to deploy to heroku?

  1. Clone https://github.com/fossasia/open-event-orga-server
  2. Go to directory of open event orga server(/open-event-orga-server)
  3. Add git remote
     heroku git:remote -a open-event
  4. You can check if open event is added to git remote
    $ git remote -v
    heroku https://git.heroku.com/open-event.git (fetch)
    heroku https://git.heroku.com/open-event.git (push)
    origin https://github.com/fossasia/open-event-orga-server.git (fetch)
    origin https://github.com/fossasia/open-event-orga-server.git (push)
  5. Now you can deploy changes to open-event application(You need a permissions 🙂 )

Why should you use a Heroku?

It’s great to deploy apps because you are able to share content in short time what I’ve done. Besides it’s very well documented so you can find there answers for most of your questions. Finally most of things you can configure using Heroku dashboard so it’s the best advantages of this tool.

Continue ReadingWhy should you use Heroku?

Better fields and validation in Flask Restplus

We at Open Event Server project are using flask-restplus for API. Apart from auto-generating of Swagger specification, another great plus point of restplus is how easily we can set input and output models and the same is automatically shown in Swagger UI. We can also auto-validate the input in POST/PUT requests to make sure that we get what we want.

@api.expect(EVENT_POST, validate=True)
def put(self, id):
    """Modify object at id"""
    pass

As can be seen above, the validate param for namespace.expect decorator allows us to auto-validate the input payloads. This used to work well until one day I realized there were a few problems.

  1. When a field was defined as say for example field.Integer, then it will accept only Integer values, not even null.
  2. If there is a string field and it has required param set to True, then also it is possible to set empty string as its value and the in-built validator won’t catch it.
  3. Even if I somehow managed to hack my way to support null in field, it will also support null even if required=True.
  4. We had no control on what error message was returned.
EVENT = api.model('Event', {
    'id': fields.Integer,
    'name': fields.String(required=True)
})

Specially problem #1 was a huge one as it questioned the whole foundation of the API. So we realized it will be better if we don’t use namespace.expect and use a custom validator. For custom validator, we first had to create custom fields that this validator can benefit from. Luckily flask-restplus comes with a great API for creating custom fields. So we quickly created custom fields for all common fields (Integer, String) and more specific fields like Email, Uri and Color. Creating these specific fields were a huge advantage as now we can show proper example for each field types in the Swagger UI.

class Email(fields.String):
    """
    Email field
    """
    __schema_type__ = 'string'
    __schema_format__ = 'email'
    __schema_example__ = 'email@domain.com'

Consider the above code; now when we use Email as a field for a value, then the example shown for it in Swagger UI will be ‘email@domain.com’. Quite cool, right?

Now we needed a way to validate these fields. For that, what we did was to create a validate method in each of the field-classes. This validate method would get the value and check if it was valid. Consider the following code –

import re
EMAIL_REGEX = re.compile(r'S+@S+.S+')

class Email():
	def validate(self, value):
		if not value:
		    return False if self.required else True
		if not EMAIL_REGEX.match(value):
		    return False
		return True

Once each of the field had their validate methods, we created a validate_payload() function that uses the API model and compares it with the payload. It will first check if all required keys are present in the payload or not. When that is true, it finally validates each field’s value using their field’s classvalidate method.

from flask import abort
from flask_restplus import fields
from custom_fields import CustomField

def validate_payload(payload, api_model):
    # check if any reqd fields are missing in payload
    for key in api_model:
        if api_model[key].required and key not in payload:
            abort(400, 'Required field '%s' missing' % key)
    # check payload
    for key in payload:
        field = api_model[key]
        if isinstance(field, fields.List):
            field = field.container
            data = payload[key]
        else:
            data = [payload[key]]
        if isinstance(field, CustomField) and hasattr(field, 'validate'):
            for i in data:
                if not field.validate(i):
                    abort(400, 'Validation of '%s' field failed' % key)

The CustomField is the base class that each of the custom fields mentioned above inherit. So checking if field was an instance of CustomField is enough to know if it is a custom field or not. Other thing that may look weird in the above code is use of fields.List. If you look closely, I have added this to support custom fields inside lists. So if you have used a custom field in a list, it will also work too. But obviously, this only supports single level lists for now. The thing is we didn’t needed more than that so I let it go. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

This basically sums up how we are validating input payloads at Open Event. Of course this is very basic but we will keep on improving it as the project progresses. Stay tuned to opev blog if you want to be in touch with the progress of the project.

Links to full code at the time of writing this post are –

  1. Custom Fields
  2. Validate Payload

I hope you found this post useful. Thanks for reading.

 

{{ Repost from my personal blog http://aviaryan.in/blog/gsoc/restplus-validation-custom-fields.html }}

Continue ReadingBetter fields and validation in Flask Restplus

Export Timeline as iCal

iCal or iCalendar is the Internet standard for sharing event schedules or session timelines among each other. The filename extension for iCal is .ics . It is supported by a number of applications such as Google Calendar, Apple Calendar,] Yahoo! Calendar, Lightning extension for Mozilla Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, and partially by Microsoft Outlook . In Open Event Organizer’s Server we have added a feature to export the Schedule of a particular Event in iCal format.

Continue ReadingExport Timeline as iCal

Building interactive elements with HTML and javascript: Drag and Drop

{ Repost from my personal blog @ https://blog.codezero.xyz/building-interactive-elements-with-html-and-javascript-drag-and-drop }

Traditionally, all interactions in a website has been mostly via form inputs or clicking on links/button. The introduction of native Drag-and-drop as a part of the HTML5 spec, opened developers to a new way of Graphical input. So, how could this be implemented ?

Making any HTML element draggable is as simple as adding draggable="true" as an attribute.

<div id="a-draggable-div" draggable=true>  
    <h4>Drag me</h4>
</div>  

This will allow the user to drag div#a-draggable-div. Next, we need to designate a dropzone, into which the user can drop the div.

<div id="dropzone" ondragover="onDragOver(event)">  
</div>  
function onDragOver(e) {  
    // This function is called everytime 
    // an element is dragged over div#dropzone
    var dropzone = ev.target;

}

Now, the user will be able to drag the element. But, nothing will happen when the user drops it into the dropzone. We’ll need to define and handle that event. HTML5 provides ondrop attribute to bind to the drop event.

When the user drops the div into the drop zone, we’ll have to move the div from it’s original position into the drop zone. This has to be done in the drop event.

<div id="dropzone"  
ondrop="onDrop(event)"  
ondragover="onDragOver(event)"> </div>  
function onDrop(e) {  
    e.preventDefault();
    var draggableDiv = document.getElementById("a-draggable-div");
    draggableDiv.setAttribute("draggable", "false");
    e.target.appendChild(draggableDiv);
}

So, when the user drops the div into the drop zone, we’re disabling the draggable property of the div and appending it into the drop zone.

This is a very basic drag and drop implementation. It gets the job done. But, HTML5 provides us with more events to make the user’s experience even better 1.

Event Description
drag Fired when an element or text selection is being dragged.
dragend Fired when a drag operation is being ended (for example, by releasing a mouse button or hitting the escape key).
dragenter Fired when a dragged element or text selection enters a valid drop target.
dragexit Fired when an element is no longer the drag operation’s immediate selection target.
dragleave Fired when a dragged element or text selection leaves a valid drop target.
dragover Fired when an element or text selection is being dragged over a valid drop target
dragstart Fired when the user starts dragging an element or text selection.
drop Fired when an element or text selection is dropped on a valid drop target.

With these events a little bit of css magic a more user friendly experience can be created like highlighting the drop zones when the user starts to drag an element or changing the element’s text based on its state.

Demo:

https://jsfiddle.net/niranjan94/tkbcv3md/16/embedded/

External Resources:
Continue ReadingBuilding interactive elements with HTML and javascript: Drag and Drop