Tutorial¶

Note

This tutorial is intended for a reader that is well versed in the Django basics of the ORM, urls routing, function based views, and templates.

It is also expected that you have already installed iommi in your project. Read section 1 of Getting started.

This tutorial will build a discography app. Let’s start with the models:

class Artist(Model):
    name = CharField(max_length=255, db_index=True)

class Album(Model):
    name = CharField(max_length=255, db_index=True)
    artist = ForeignKey(Artist, on_delete=CASCADE, related_name='albums')
    year = IntegerField(default=1980)
    genres = ManyToManyField(Genre, related_name='albums')

class Track(Model):
    name = CharField(max_length=255, db_index=True)
    index = IntegerField()
    album = ForeignKey(Album, on_delete=CASCADE, related_name='tracks')
    duration = CharField(max_length=255, db_index=False, null=True, blank=True)

We will build up to these pages:

index page with album artwork
an artist page
an artists page
an album page
an albums page
a tracks page

Plus we’re going to enable the iommi admin for these models.

Example data¶

If you want it to get the same example data as in this tutorial, run this code.

Tables¶

Creating a table view of a model in iommi is simple:

urlpatterns = [
    path('', Table(auto__model=Album).as_view()),
]

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You get sorting and pagination by default, and we’re using the default bootstrap 5 style. iommi ships with more styles that you can switch to, or you can implement your own custom style.

At this point you might think “Hold on! Where is the template?”. There isn’t one. We don’t need a template. iommi works at a higher level of abstraction. Don’t worry, you can drop down to templates if you need to. There are examples of this in the table cookbook, and much more. One of the most important concepts is to include or exclude columns using includes: auto__include=['name', 'artist'], or using excludes: auto__exclude=['artist', 'year'].

Pages¶

So far we’ve just created a single table, but often you want something a little more complex, especially for your index page. iommi has a concept of a Page that is used to build up a bigger page from smaller building blocks. Let’s build out our simple web app to have separate pages for albums, artists and tracks:

urlpatterns = [
    path('albums/', Table(auto__model=Album).as_view()),
    path('artists/', Table(auto__model=Artist).as_view()),
    path('tracks/', Table(auto__model=Track).as_view()),
]

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and an index page with three tables, a header and some text:

class IndexPage(Page):
    title = html.h1('Supernaut')
    welcome_text = 'This is a discography of the best acts in music!'

    artists = Table(auto__model=Artist, page_size=5)
    albums = Table(auto__model=Album, page_size=5)
    tracks = Table(auto__model=Track, page_size=5)

urlpatterns = [
    path('', IndexPage().as_view()),
]

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html is a little fragment builder to make it easier and faster to build small html parts. html.div('foo') is just a more convenient way to write Fragment(tag='div', children__text='foo'). Fragments are used internally throughout iommi, because they allow you to define a small bit of html that can be customized later. Let’s look at an example:

>>> class MyPage(Page):
...    title = html.h1('Supernaut')

>>> MyPage().bind().__html__()
'<h1>Supernaut</h1>'

>>> MyPage(parts__title__attrs__class__foo=True).bind().__html__()
'<h1 class="foo">Supernaut</h1>'

This is used throughout iommi to provide good defaults that can be customized easily when needed.

A Page can contain any Part (like Fragment, Table, Form, Menu, etc), plain strings or Django Template objects even. Escaping is handled like you’d expect from Django where strings are escaped, and you can use format_html/mark_safe to send your raw html straight through.

Path decoding¶

We’ll also introduce a page for an individual artist. We will use iommi’s Path decoding here.

First we register the path component we want to decode (in your AppConfig ready):

register_path_decoding(
    artist_name=Artist.name,
)

Then we define our page. Notice the lambdas we use to dynamically get the parameters to retrieve the correct data.

class ArtistPage(Page):
    title = html.h1(lambda artist, **_: artist.name)

    albums = Table(
        auto__model=Album,
        rows=lambda artist, **_: Album.objects.filter(artist=artist),
    )
    tracks = Table(
        auto__model=Track,
        rows=lambda artist, **_: Track.objects.filter(album__artist=artist),
    )

urlpatterns = [
    path('artist/<artist_name>/', ArtistPage().as_view()),
]

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Path decoders in iommi can be more convenient compared to Django path decoders, as instead of writing <artist:artist> everywhere, you can instead write <artist_name> or <artist_pk>. They are also easier to set up and gives you hook points for access control if needed.

Deeper customization¶

cell__format¶

In iommi you can customize the rendering on many different levels, depending on what the situation requires. The last layer of customization is format which is used to convert the value of a cell to a string that is inserted into the html (or CSV or whatever output format you are targeting):

albums = Table(
    auto__model=Album,
    columns__artist__cell__format=lambda value, **_:
        format_html('<a href="/artist/{}/">{}</a>', value, value)
)

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columns__artist__cell__format should be read as something similar to columns.artist.cell.format. This way of jumping namespace with __ instead of . (because . is syntactically invalid!) is something Django started doing for query sets and we really like it so we’ve taken this concept further and it is now everywhere in iommi.

The other levels of customization are value which is how the value is extracted from the row, attr which is the attribute that is read (if you don’t customize value), and lastly template which you use to override the entire rendering of the cell (including the td tag!).

You can also override template on the row to customize the row rendering. Again this includes the tr tag.

cell__url¶

A very common case of tables is to show a link in the cell. You can do that with cell_format and cell__template like above, but it’s such a common case that we supply a special convenience method cell__url for this. Let’s make the artist column link to the artist page in our table. First we add a get_absolute_url on the model, then replace the columns__artist__cell__format we had above with:

albums = Table(
    auto__model=Album,
        columns__artist__cell__url=lambda value, **_: value.get_absolute_url(),
)

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Much better!

But actually, this is such a common case that we do this by default for you for ForeignKey columns if the target model has get_absolute_url. So we can just remove the columns__artist__cell__url specification entirely. But we do want the name column to link to the album page so the total definition becomes:

albums = Table(
    auto__model=Album,
    columns__name__cell__url=lambda row, **_: row.get_absolute_url(),
)

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Filters¶

Tables also have built in filtering. To enable a filter make sure include is True for the filter of a column.

albums = Table(
    auto__model=Album,
    columns__name__filter__include=True,
    columns__year__filter__include=True,
    columns__year__filter__field__include=False,
    columns__artist__filter__include=True,
)

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columns__year__filter__field__include=False means we turn off the Field in the form that is created, but we can still search for the year in the advanced search language.

To handle selecting from a choice field that is backed by a QuerySet that can contain thousands or millions of rows, iommi by default uses a select2 filter control with an automatic ajax endpoint. The automatic endpoint is handled by iommi on the same url as the view. An advantage to this approach is that we only need to be sure our view has the correct permission checks and then we also know the select box (or ajax endpoint) has the same checks. This makes it easy to reason about the security of the product.

The advanced filter means users can write queries like year>1960 and title:war to find albums published after 1960 and that contain the word “war”.

Actions¶

An Action in iommi is a link or a button. We use them for submit buttons of forms and for links that you can add to a part. A common use case is to add links to a table. In our example app we want to add a create button for staff.

While we’re at it, let’s add some new columns for edit and delete links. There are special shortcuts in iommi prebuild for that too: Column.edit and Column.delete.

albums = Table(
    auto__model=Album,
    actions__create_album=Action(
        attrs__href='/albums/create/',
        include=lambda request, **_: request.user.is_staff,
    ),
    columns__edit=Column.edit(
        after=0,
        include=lambda request, **_: request.user.is_staff,
    ),
    columns__delete=Column.delete(
        include=lambda request, **_: request.user.is_staff,
    ),
)

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For non-staff the “Create album” button isn’t shown, neither are the edit and delete columns:

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cell__template¶

Now that we have a basic app, we’d like to customize the look of the index page a bit. A plain html table with text doesn’t look very cool, so we will spice it up with album covers. We’ll start by removing the artists section.

A custom cell template for albums might be a good start to make it look nicer.

albums = Table(
    auto__model=Album,
    columns__album_art=Column(
        attr=None,
        cell__template=Template('''
            <td>
                <img
                    height="30"
                    src="../../album_art/{{ row.artist }}/{{ row.name }}.jpg">
            </td>
        '''),
    ),
)

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That’s a start, but we want something a bit more showy, let’s get rid of html tables entirely:

row__template¶

To override the rendering of an entire row we use cell__template. We also change the table from rendering a table tag to a div, and turn off the table header:

albums = Table(
    auto__model=Album,
    tag='div',
    header__template=None,
    row__template=Template("""
        <div class="card" style="width: 15rem; display: inline-block;" {{ cells.attrs }}>
            <img class="card-img-top" src="../../album_art/{{ row.artist }}/{{ row.name|urlencode }}.jpg">
            <div class="card-body text-center">
                <h5>{{ cells.name }}</h5>
                <p class="card-text">
                    {{ cells.artist }}
                </p>
            </div>
        </div>
    """),
)

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You can specify the name of a template file here instead of writing the template inline like this. This way is nicer for small things and quick prototypes though.

Admin¶

With these high level abstractions we’ve seen so far (pages, tables, queries, forms, fragments) we can easily build more powerful components. Which is what we’ve done with the administration interface built into iommi. Installing it is as simple as:

class MyAdmin(Admin):
    class Meta:
        pass

urlpatterns = [
    path('iommi-admin/', include(MyAdmin.urls())),
]

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Customization is easy with IOMMI_DEBUG on (default on if DEBUG is on), here’s how to use the pick tool:

You can override an entire field rendering with template, the template of the label with label__template, the name of a field with display_name, add a CSS class to the label tag with label__attrs__class__foo=True, and much more. Customization is at all levels, and in all these cases you can supply a callable for even more flexibility.

Forms¶

iommi also comes with a library for forms. This can look very much like the forms library built into Django, but is different in some crucial ways. Let’s take a simple example of a ModelForm:

from django import forms

class AlbumForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Album
        fields = ['name', 'artist']

{% extends "base.html" %}
{% block content %}

<form action="/your-name/" method="post">
    {% csrf_token %}
    {{ form }}
    <input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>

{% endblock %}

In iommi the same can be written as:

class AlbumForm(Form):
    class Meta:
        auto__model = Album
        auto__include = ['name', 'artist']

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No template needed, and this is the view too with Form.edit or Form.createcookbook-forms.

In iommi you always get a form encoding specified on the form, so they all work with file uploads. Missing form encoding on the form tag is a very common stumbling block for beginners. You also get a submit action by default which you can configure via actions__submit:

class AlbumForm(Form):
    class Meta:
        auto__model = Album
        auto__include = ['name', 'artist']
        actions__submit__display_name = 'Save'

In iommi we use class Meta a lot, similar to Django, but in iommi it’s not just a bucket of values, it has a precise definition: values in Meta are passed into the constructor. So the example above is semantically the same as:

AlbumForm(
    auto__model=Album,
    auto__include=['name', 'artist'],
    actions__submit__display_name='Save',
)

Worth pointing out is that values of Meta are defaults, so you can still override at the constructor call.

An advantage to this strict definition is that we don’t have silent failures in iommi. If you make a spelling mistake for a setting in Meta, you will get an error message.

There are many many more customizations options available, you can find more in the form cookbook and the docs for Field.

Automatic views¶

iommi goes a step further than Django forms, by supplying full views that can be used from either a declarative form or an auto generated form. An example is to have a create view for an Artist:

urlpatterns = [
    path('create/', Form.create(auto__model=Artist).as_view()),
]

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There are four built in forms/views like this: create, edit, create_and_edit and delete. The delete view is a read only form with some styling for the submit button and a submit handler that delete the object. We find this to be really nice as a confirmation page because you can see what you are about to delete.

Wrap up¶

I’m glad you read this far! This has been a very shallow introduction, but it has touched on all the major parts in some way, and there is a lot of material to cover. We hope you want to give iommi a try.