Warning

Starting from CubicWeb version 4.0 all code related to generating html views has been moved to the Cube cubicweb_web.

If you want to migrate a project from 3.38 to 4.* while still using all the html views you need to both install the cubicweb_web cube AND add it to your dependencies and run add_cube('web').

cubicweb_web can be installed from pypi this way:

pip install cubicweb_web

We don’t plan to maintain the features in cubicweb_web in the long run; we are moving to a full javascript frontend using both cubicweb_api (which exposes a HTTP API) and @cubicweb/client as a frontend javascript toolkit.

In the long run cubicweb_api will be merged inside of CubicWeb.

Publisher#

What happens when an HTTP request is issued ?

The story begins with the CubicWebPublisher.main_publish method. We do not get upper in the bootstrap process because it is dependant on the used HTTP library.

What main_publish does:

  • get a controller id and a result set from the path (this is actually delegated to the urlpublisher component)

  • the controller is then selected (if not, this is considered an authorization failure and signaled as such) and called

  • then either a proper result is returned, in which case the request/connection object issues a commit and returns the result

  • or error handling must happen:

    • ValidationErrors pop up there and may lead to a redirect to a previously arranged url or standard error handling applies

    • an HTTP 500 error (Internal Server Error) is issued

Now, let’s turn to the controller. There are many of them in cubicweb.web.views.basecontrollers. We can just follow the default view controller that is selected on a view path. See the Controllers chapter for more information on controllers.

The View controller’s entry point is the publish method. It does the following:

  • compute the main view to be applied, using either the given result set or building one from a user provided rql string (rql and vid can be forced from the url GET parameters), that is:

    • compute the vid using the result set and the schema (see cubicweb.web.views.vid_from_rset)

    • handle all error cases that could happen in this phase

  • do some cache management chores

  • select a main template (typically TheMainTemplate, see chapter Templates)

  • call it with the result set and the computed view.

What happens next actually depends on the template and the view, but in general this is the rendering phase.

CubicWebPublisher API#