Ajax

Warning

This approach is deprecated in favor of using cwclientlibjs. If your use react for your UI, try the react components from the cwelements library. The documentation is kept here as reference.

For historical reference of what Ajax is and used to be, one can read the wikipedia article about Ajax.

CubicWeb provides a few helpers to facilitate javascript <-> python communications.

You can, for instance, register some python functions that will become callable from javascript through ajax calls. All the ajax URLs are handled by the cubicweb_web.views.ajaxcontroller.AjaxController controller.

The ajaxcontroller module defines the AjaxController controller and the ajax-func cubicweb registry.

class cubicweb_web.views.ajaxcontroller.AjaxController(*args, **kwargs)

AjaxController handles ajax remote calls from javascript

The following javascript function call:

var d = asyncRemoteExec('foo', 12, "hello");
d.addCallback(function(result) {
    alert('server response is: ' + result);
});

will generate an ajax HTTP GET on the following url:

BASE_URL/ajax?fname=foo&arg=12&arg="hello"

The AjaxController controller will therefore be selected to handle those URLs and will itself select the cubicweb_web.views.ajaxcontroller.AjaxFunction matching the fname parameter.

publish(rset=None)

publish the current request, with an optional input rset

ajax-funcs registry hosts exposed remote functions, that is functions that can be called from the javascript world.

To register a new remote function, either decorate your function with the ajaxfunc() decorator:

from cubicweb.predicates import mactch_user_groups
from cubicweb_web.views.ajaxcontroller import ajaxfunc

@ajaxfunc(output_type='json', selector=match_user_groups('managers'))
def list_users(self):
    return [u for (u,) in self._cw.execute('Any L WHERE U login L')]

or inherit from AjaxFunction and implement the __call__ method:

from cubicweb_web.views.ajaxcontroller import AjaxFunction
class ListUser(AjaxFunction):
    __regid__ = 'list_users' # __regid__ is the name of the exposed function
    __select__ = match_user_groups('managers')
    output_type = 'json'

    def __call__(self):
        return [u for (u, ) in self._cw.execute('Any L WHERE U login L')]

class cubicweb_web.views.ajaxcontroller.AjaxFunction(req, **extra)

Attributes on this base class are:

Attr

check_pageid: make sure the pageid received is valid before proceeding

Attr

output_type:

• None: no processing, no change on content-type

• json: serialize with json_dumps and set application/json

  content-type

• xhtml: wrap result in an XML node and forces HTML / XHTML

  content-type (use _cw.html_content_type())

cubicweb_web.views.ajaxcontroller.ajaxfunc(implementation=None, selector=<Predicate yes at 7f36f1c54dd0>, output_type=None, check_pageid=False, regid=None)

promote a standard function to an AjaxFunction appobject.

All parameters are optional:

Parameters

• selector – a custom selector object if needed, default is yes()

• output_type – either None, ‘json’ or ‘xhtml’ to customize output content-type. Default is None

• check_pageid – whether the function requires a valid pageid or not to proceed. Default is False.

• regid – a custom __regid__ for the created AjaxFunction object. Default is to keep the wrapped function name.

ajaxfunc can be used both as a standalone decorator:

@ajaxfunc
def my_function(self):
    return 42

or as a parametrizable decorator:

@ajaxfunc(output_type='json')
def my_function(self):
    return 42