README.rst

Introduction

The ox_ui package provides tools for writing user interfaces.

For example, ox_ui lets you take a command defined using the click library and convert it to something you can run in a Flask web server as discussed in the Click to WTForms section.

Click to WTForms

The ox_ui package can convert a click command into a flask route using the WTForms library. This can be convenient both so that you have a command line interface (CLI) for your functions in addition to a web interface and also because sometimes it is quicker and easier to define the CLI interface and auto-generate the web interface.

Imagine you define a function called hello_cmd via something like:

@click.command()
@click.option('--count', default=1, type=int, help='how many times to say it')
@click.option('--text', default='hi', type=str, help='what to say')
def hello_cmd(count, text):
    'say hello'

    result = []
    for i in range(count):
        result.append(text)

    return '\n'.join(result)

You can import c2f from ox_ui.core and use it to convert your hello_cmd into a flask route via something like:

from flask import Flask
from ox_ui.core import c2f

APP = Flask(__name__)

@APP.route('/hello', methods=('GET', 'POST'))
def hello():
    fcmd = c2f.ClickToWTF(hello_cmd)
    result = fcmd.handle_request()
    return result

Once you start your flask web server, you will then have a route that introspects hello_cmd, creates a web form using the WTForms library and handles the command.

See examples in the tests directory for more details.

Other Utilities

A few additional utilites are provided in the ox_ui/core/decorators.py module including a watched decorator to log the start/end of functions, a setup_flask_watch function which applies the watched decorator to allow your routes using the before_request and teardown_request hooks in flask, and a LockFile context decorator for easily adding lock files to any function or context.