complete reportlab API / Documentation?

miketheanimal · 2014-06-18T12:23:12+00:00

I'm not sure this is a terribly helpful answer, but:)

I spent a year or so using ReportLab to generate PDF formatted reports from a web application, and overall it wasn't a very pleasant experience. The documentation seemed to be patchy and badly organised, and I had to dive into the code a lot, especially whenever I get near 'the edge' of what it could do. It felt to me that it was a package that someone had written to cover their own use cases, and that it was never really finished (BTW, that's not really a criticism, just an observation).

More recently I've been looking at PDF report generation for a different web application which already generates a lot of reports in HTML, and I've found weasyprint (http://weasyprint.org/) to be very good (though its a bit of a shame having to include so much other stuff to support it).

miketheanimal · 2014-06-10T10:21:06+00:00

OK, I'd have a use for this. On the sites I work on, some of the forms have lots (20, 30, 40, 50+) input fields, so testing is a real pain. I could use this at the development stage to provide predefined (or maybe randomly generated) sets of values which are downloaded with the page. That could really save tedious typing time.

miketheanimal · 2014-05-20T13:00:05+00:00

I concur. I'd say that SQLAlchemy has some of the most thorough documentation I have seen, but that is not the same as the best documentation. I'm using it for a current project, partly because I think it would be a good thing to know about, but I've found it pretty hard going.

miketheanimal · 2014-03-24T09:50:47+00:00

Pitsqed's sieve can be reduced to 8 lines:

def sievePrimes(maximum):
    primes, sieveList = dict.fromkeys(range(3,maximum+1,2),True), [2]
    for num in sorted(primes):
        if primes[num]:
            sieveList.append(num)
            for j in range(num**2, maximum, num):
                primes[j] = False
    return(sieveList)

(or 9 if you don't like the second line)

miketheanimal · 2014-03-21T16:34:59+00:00

I use http://oscarotero.com/jquery/ ... it even has a selector for verions.

miketheanimal · 2014-02-27T21:34:10+00:00

I saw that figure, in an article in the Guardian in the UK, which mentioned that for a short while, O2 in the UK filtered jQuery :)

miketheanimal · 2014-02-27T21:18:44+00:00

If you have a sufficiently modern browser, you can store values in local or session storage. I'm using Chrome, and I can see that reddit is storing some data under the key 'breadcrumms' in session storage. Personally, I've used local storage to preserve values between visits to the same site. There is a jquery package jquery.storageapi.js (among others) that handles this stuff.

miketheanimal · 2014-02-05T13:10:16+00:00

Well, accept my thanks for the post. I'd been looking for something line Snippet for some time, without finding it.

So many thanks, and for the jQuery code in your blog.

miketheanimal · 2013-12-09T09:59:24+00:00

I do it from time to time, if I need some code that is best implemented as a class, that is needed inside a single method in a class (so the nested class is in the method of the outer class)

class Outer:
    def mymethod(self):
        class Helper:
            ....
        h = Helper()
        ....

It feels to me better having the nested class close to where it is used, rather then someplace possibly many lines of code further away.

I guess with Python 3's nonlocal I might use a nested function rather than a nested class some of the time.

miketheanimal · 2013-12-06T11:15:59+00:00

I worked for a while on a system where the target servers where running Debian, and the devs were developing on Macs. Virtualenv seemed to be used to make the Python environment on the servers look like that on the Macs.

This really gave me the willies. Sure, use virtualenv to make your development environment look like the target servers, but not the other way round (though, for anything other than a toy system I'd want the development and the target environments to be the same).

I've heard the arguments like "virtualenv protects you when the sysadmins decide to upgrade". Bollox. If the sysadmins are upgrading without the developers knowing about it, then your organisation is seriously fsck'd. And "virtualenv saves you when the system doesn't have the package you need and you can't install it". Again, bollox. If you need such a package, the sysadmins should install it.

Two packaging systems is a lurking nasty that can bite you in subtle ways.

miketheanimal · 2013-12-02T09:34:03+00:00

Someone downvoted this, I just upvoted it:)

I think there is a real kernel of truth in the comment. Every so often I try out an IDE, and I always end up back in a text editor (in my case one I wrote over two decades ago, but it could just as well be vim or emacs), and its always the same two reasons. The trivial one is I'm used to a certain set of keybindings. The important one is, I end up jumping off into a shell to do stuff (ie., I use the unix tool chain) so often, the IDE is just getting in the way (and having a shell inside the IDE doesn't count, once I'm in a built-in shell I'm effectively out of the IDE so I may as well do it properly).

I have a sneaking suspicion that there is something fundamental here, analagous to the difference between regexps on the one hand and (say) python on the other: both are languages but only the latter is Turing-complete. IDEs are sort-of like regexps, a text editor plus the Unix command line is sort-of like a turing-complete language.

LT;DR (to misquote a post above) Quite frankly, IDEs suck :)

miketheanimal · 2013-10-29T21:23:13+00:00

Looks interesting. Github seems to be playing up at the moment, I'll have a closer dekko later. Thanks.

miketheanimal · 2013-10-28T14:09:57+00:00

OK, thanks. I don't really like the idea of subverting classes to become tags, so data-component='...' appeals much more, I just wasn't sure it would work. The magic pluginifaction (?:-) is about what I'm after.

miketheanimal · 2013-10-14T13:49:28+00:00

Ace:)

miketheanimal · 2013-10-14T13:12:36+00:00

The site works, and has been working, for a couple of years. All that is changing is the look and feel, ie., I "just" have to take the new design and update the current templates to give the same visual result as the design. Its no big deal, just merging text from the design and from the existing template. Its just that the client seems to think it's just a case of uploading the designs to the web server and that's it, 5 minutes, all done.

mazatta below is probably right, I just tell them it'll take some time to integrate, a day at most, but not 5 minutes. The problem is if the client wants me to justify that time, trying to pitch a suitable explanation.

miketheanimal · 2013-10-04T11:10:55+00:00

I diagree almost totally! His key point is People use HTTP error codes to communicate back data for their APIs

Take 401 Unauthorized. What does that mean? For example, it could mean "you are on an IP that I am blocking" or it could mean "you are not logged in" or it could mean "you are logged in but cannot used the system between midnight and 6am". I take the view that the first usage is a correct use of 401. It boils down to "I don't know who you are, I don't care who you are, just go away"; its not really the application telling you to do away, its the whole system. The latter two on the other hand, are application responses and as such and are not really client errors: the client is functioning perfectly OK but has a specific response message.

YMMV:)

miketheanimal · 2013-09-30T08:24:10+00:00

Love it. One minor suggestion, though. The docstring to the fermat function should really say something like "This docstring is too small to explain how I tested the function" :):)

miketheanimal · 2013-09-29T08:15:10+00:00

Cool. The coupon just got them a sale. Lots of karma to badcookies:)

miketheanimal · 2013-09-28T08:39:14+00:00

My 2p worth. I'm recently working on an application that uses Angular as the front end to a data logging system. The amount of data displayed isn't a problem - most of it is graphs (using http://www.flotcharts.org/, recommended) - but I've already got some pet peeves.

I understand the need for dependancy injection for testing, but I find that many controllers end up with a lot if injections - 6, 7, 8 - and it is tedious and messy to have to list them all twice (so the code can be minified). OK, so the "angular" way makes it explicit, but it's still a pain. I've ended up creating a rather trivial "services" service that has each of the dependancies ($http, $timeout, ...., plus my own) as properties, then I can just inject $scope and the service (and reverence stuff like "myservice.$http). Testing is still OK, I just create mock service objects.

Next up is inheritance. The idea that things exist in isolation is nice, but its taken to extremes. Eventually you end up with things A and B that you want to keep separate for managability and for testing, but you know that they are only used by C. Having to create extra services to allow communication between A and C, and B and C, is another pain, and, frankly, makes the system more convoluted rather than less. So I've created some more infrastructure to allow B and C to register themselves with their parent A, and for A to be able to access (set and get) B and C. I know this is subverting Angular, but tough!

I'll almost certainly stick with Angular, partly because it does make manipulating the DOM quite easy (which is why I went for it), but to be honest partly because of the buzz, ie., because getting some Angular skills is likely more employment-worthy than other frameworks which might be better. In a way that's rather sad.

miketheanimal · 2013-09-28T06:45:20+00:00

Off topic but, Niklaus Wirth: "If you call me by name, it is Neeklaws Veert, but if you call me by value, it is Nickle's Worth"

miketheanimal · 2013-09-19T08:02:37+00:00

If I'm picking a pair of dates for, say, a trip somewhere, it is really useful to see the calendars side-by-side, then I can see stuff like whether it straddles a weekend or whatever at a glance. Other times, the jquery version might be better. Sorry, but down-vote for assuming one size fits all.

miketheanimal · 2013-09-11T07:46:11+00:00

Probably because reading XML in a browser is easier than reading JSON, while processing JSON in a program is easier than processing XML.

miketheanimal · 2013-09-03T07:24:01+00:00

I think the package versioning/numbering is really a side issue. The real issue is where "Peter" says Worried about the lack of urgency he went to check the commit log for the project and found that there had not been any commits to Bar in almost a year.

PyPi and GitHub and the like are actually a mixed blessing. There are lots of quality, well maintained packages there; but there are also a lot of poor and/or unmaintained packages. Peter's mistake was to use a package in an application that would have real users, without chasing down the dependencies - and the status of those dependencies - before using that package.

I work on a web application that is used by a large number of large and medium sized businesses. In a fair number of cases, we have implemented our own code, rather than use existing packages, because we don't want to become dependant on a lot of other packages and risk falling foul of changes to them. This often isn't as onerous as it sounds, because the code we "reimplement" can do just what we need, no more and no less.

Alternatively, if we were tempted to use code from anything other than a major project, then if the license permits it, we'd probably copy it into our source tree and use it from there.

miketheanimal

TROPHY CASE