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More about the main page

This page explains how to customize the elements of the main page of a Lino application.

Vocabulary

dashboard item

An individual item of the dashboard, rendered directly (inline) into the main page because it is considered an important entry point.

This page contains code snippets (lines starting with >>>), which are being tested during our development workflow. The following snippet initializes the demo project used throughout this page.

Code snippets in this document are tested using the lino_book.projects.noi1e demo project.

>>> from lino_book.projects.noi1e.startup import *

Quick links

As the application developer you define quick links by overriding the setup_quicklinks methods of your Site class.

For example the lino.modlib.about plugin says:

class Plugin(Plugin):

    def get_quicklinks(site):
        yield 'about.SiteSearch'

Or the lino_noi.lib.noi.settings module says:

class Site(Site):
    ...
    def setup_quicklinks(self, user, tb):
        super().setup_quicklinks(user, tb)
        tb.add_action(self.models.tickets.RefTickets)
        ...
        tb.add_action(
            self.models.tickets.AllTickets.insert_action,
            label=_("Submit a ticket"))
        ...
        a = self.models.users.MySettings.default_action
        tb.add_instance_action(user, action=a, label=_("My settings"))

>>> pprint(settings.SITE.quicklinks.items)
...
[<lino.core.actions.WrappedAction users_Me_detail ('My settings')>,
 <lino.core.actions.WrappedAction calview_WeeklyView_detail ('Calendar')>,
 <lino.core.actions.WrappedAction tickets_RefTickets_grid>,
 <lino.core.actions.WrappedAction tickets_ActiveTickets_grid>,
 <lino.core.actions.WrappedAction tickets_AllTickets_grid>,
 <lino.core.actions.WrappedAction tickets_AllTickets_insert ('Submit new ticket')>,
 <lino.core.actions.WrappedAction search_SiteSearch_grid>]

The admin_main.html template calls lino.core.Site.get_quicklink_items() to retrieve and then render this information.

>>> ar = rt.login("robin")
>>> user = ar.get_user()
>>> for ql in settings.SITE.get_quicklink_items(user.user_type):
...     print(tostring(ar.menu_item_button(ql)))
...
<a href="…" title="Edit your user preferences.">My settings</a>
<a href="…" title="Open a detail window on records of calview.">Calendar</a>
<a href="…">Reference Tickets</a>
<a href="…">Active tickets</a>
<a href="…">All tickets</a>
<a href="…" title="Insert a new Ticket.">Submit new ticket</a>
<a href="…">Search</a>

Welcome messages

As the application developer you have several methods to define welcome messages:

• Set welcome_message_when_count of some table to some value (usually 0).

  For example the lino_xl.lib.tickets.TicketsToTriage plugin uses this to define the “You have X items in Tickets to triage” message.

• Define a custom welcome message by overwriting add_welcome_handler in the Site class of your application.

  For example the “You are busy with…” message in Lino Noi is lino_xl.lib.working. Or lino_xl.lib.stars defines the “Your stars are” message.

The admin_main.html calls get_welcome_messages. This code inserts the “welcome messages” for this user on this site. get_welcome_messages returns an etree element (see etgen.html).

>>> ar = rt.login("robin")
>>> print(tostring(settings.SITE.get_welcome_messages(ar)))
...
<span>Your nicknamed Tickets are <a href="…">daily</a>, <a href="…">friday</a>,
<a href="…">inbox</a>.</span><p><span><a href="…">Jean</a> is working on: <a
href="…" title="Irritating message when bar">#57 (Irritating message when
bar)</a>, <a href="…" title="Bars have no foo">#63 (Bars have no
foo)</a>.</span><br/><span><a href="…">Luc</a> is working on: <a href="…"
title="Misc optimizations in Baz">#59 (Misc optimizations in Baz)</a>, <a
href="…" title="Foo never bars">#65 (Foo never bars)</a>.</span><br/><span><a
href="…">Mathieu</a> is working on: <a href="…" title="Irritating message when
bar">#45 (Irritating message when bar)</a>, <a href="…" title="Bars have no
foo">#51 (Bars have no foo)</a>, <a href="…" title="Irritating message when
bar">#57 (Irritating message when bar)</a>, <a href="…" title="Bars have no
foo">#63 (Bars have no foo)</a>.</span></p><span>You have <b>13 items in Tickets
to triage</b>.</span>

The dashboard

As the application developer you define which actors are available as dashboard item for your application. You can do this in two different ways:

• override the get_dashboard_items of your Plugin classes.

• override the get_dashboard_items of your Site class.

This list is hard-coded per application and applies to all users. But Lino respects view permissions, i.e. an item will appear only if the user has permission to see it. For each dashboard item you can specify certain options to influence how Lino renders them. For example they usually don’t appear if the table contains no data.

Independently of how you define the dashboard items for your application, you can additionally opt to install the lino.modlib.dashboard plugin.

List of available dashboard items

The list of available dashboard items exists also without this plugin.

>>> ar = rt.login("robin")
>>> user = ar.get_user()
>>> pprint(list(settings.SITE.get_dashboard_items(user)))
...
[lino_xl.lib.cal.ui.MyTasks,
 lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(cal.MyEntries,header_level=2,min_count=None),
 lino_xl.lib.cal.ui.MyOverdueAppointments,
 lino_xl.lib.cal.ui.MyUnconfirmedAppointments,
 lino_xl.lib.cal.ui.MyPresences,
 lino_xl.lib.cal.ui.UpcomingEvents,
 lino_xl.lib.calview.ui.DailyPlanner,
 lino.modlib.comments.ui.RecentComments,
 lino_xl.lib.tickets.ui.MyTickets,
 lino_xl.lib.tickets.ui.TicketsToTriage,
 lino_xl.lib.tickets.ui.MyTicketsToWork,
 lino_xl.lib.working.ui.WorkedHours,
 lino_xl.lib.groups.models.MyGroups,
 lino_xl.lib.accounting.ui.MyMovements,
 lino_xl.lib.accounting.ui.JournalsOverview]

Note that in practice you would probably prefer to not use above list directly, but rather its “processed” form, stored in the user’s preferences:

>>> pprint(user.get_preferences().dashboard_items)
...
[lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(cal.MyTasks,header_level=2,min_count=1),
 lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(cal.MyEntries,header_level=2,min_count=None),
 lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(cal.MyOverdueAppointments,header_level=2,min_count=1),
 lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(cal.MyUnconfirmedAppointments,header_level=2,min_count=1),
 lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(cal.MyPresences,header_level=2,min_count=1),
 lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(calview.DailyPlanner,header_level=2,min_count=1),
 lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(comments.RecentComments,header_level=2,min_count=1),
 lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(tickets.MyTickets,header_level=2,min_count=1),
 lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(tickets.TicketsToTriage,header_level=2,min_count=1),
 lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(tickets.MyTicketsToWork,header_level=2,min_count=1),
 lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(working.WorkedHours,header_level=2,min_count=1),
 lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(groups.MyGroups,header_level=2,min_count=1),
 lino.core.dashboard.ActorItem(accounting.JournalsOverview,header_level=2,min_count=1)]

See dashboard : customizable dashboard.

Behind the scenes

The content of the main page is generated from the admin_main.html template.

admin_main_base.html

admin_main.html

This is the template used to generate the content of the main page. It is split into two files admin_main.html and admin_main_base.html.

For illustration compare the content of the latter template with its result in the following screenshots (taken from the noi1e demo project which runs Lino Noi).

Main page for AnonymousUser.

Main page for user robin.

Customizing the main page

You may define a custom admin_main.html template, as we did in The Lino Polls tutorial. But this was rather an exercise for pedagogical reasons than something we would recommend to do for application developers.

You may even go further and override the get_main_html method of your Site class to return your own html.