Dynamic way for category adding

[serdargkaya]

Hi matthiask

How can we use ForeignKey to automate adding categories.?

[matthiask]

Hey,

Just asking: Do you really want a dynamic category selection? This would probably also mean that you have to add a page for each category. If you only want to keep articles at a single place in the page hierarchy the pages and feincms3 do not have to know anything about the categories (and the example articles app in feincms3-example is already too complicated)

However, if you really require this, here are a few hopefully helpful snippets copied from the source of www.fcz.ch

app/articles/models.py:

from feincms3.apps import reverse_app

class Article(models.Model):
    # ...

    CATEGORIES = [
        ('club', _('club')),
        ('men', _('men')), 
        ('women', _('women')),
        # ...
        ('general', _('general')),
    ]

    category = models.CharField(
        _('category'),
        max_length=20,
        choices=CATEGORIES,
        db_index=True,
    )

    # ...

    def get_absolute_url(self):
        return reverse_app(
            ('articles-%s' % self.category, 'articles'),
            'article-detail',
            kwargs={'year': self.publication_date.year, 'slug': self.slug},
        )

app/pages/models.py:

class Page(AbstractPage, ...):
    # ...

    APPLICATIONS = [
        ('articles', _('articles'), {
            'urlconf': 'app.articles.urls',
            'app_instance_namespace': lambda page: page.articles_namespace,
            'required_fields': ('articles_namespace',),
        }),
        # ...
    ]

    ARTICLES_NAMESPACE_CHOICES = [
        ('articles-%s' % key, title) for key, title in Article.CATEGORIES
    ]
    ARTICLES_NAMESPACE_CHOICES = Team.ARTICLES_NAMESPACE_CHOICES + [
        ('articles', _('all articles')),
    ]
    articles_namespace = models.CharField(
        _('articles namespace'),
        max_length=50,
        choices=ARTICLES_NAMESPACE_CHOICES,
        blank=True,
    )

Of course that's not a foreign key yet, but hopefully you get the idea:

• You add the relevant data to the articles' app
• Add a field to the page model to select the data from the articles app. In the example above the list of categories is still hardcoded, but you could as well just add a nullable ForeignKey, and in fact, we also do this (not for categories, but for teams and persons)
• You add a callable with the key app_instance_namespace which returns an instance namespace such as articles-club, articles-men etc., and you use the same instance namespace to reverse URLs in Article.get_absolute_url. Of course, you should probably always keep the fallback articles namespace around if you want articles to appear anyway somewhere.
• I'd also recommend specifying required_fields, but that's up to you.

I hope this helps a bit; I'll happily explain more here, and/or hopefully add some examples to the documentation later.

[serdargkaya]

Thank you for the explanation. I'm building a news app. I need to make category creation automatic for clients. I don't wanna create pages for every category. Just wanna list items for every category thats all. Can u give more detail about how to do this? Im huge fan of cbv. Do you consider this for feincms3 ?

And thanks again

[matthiask]

Then I'd just create one single articles app, and keep categories and articles in there. You'll probably add a CategoryListView and an ArticleListView which filters by categories or something, maybe a ClientListView which links to the pre-filtered ArticleListView?

If you don't want to add pages then I wouldn't bother with app_instance_namespace and friends.

I'm not a big fan of CBV myself, but it does not matter too much because I don't intend to add views to feincms3. It's also not really necessary IMHO since views using feincms3 can be really short which makes it a bit pointless to add customization possibilities etc.

[serdargkaya]

Thank you for the quick reply. I already wrote the news application. I am thinking of using FeincM3 for other pages. But I could not integrate with category. Will try to come up with something.

[matthiask]

Btw, I noticed that feincms3-example was still using the PluginRenderer from django-content-editor. It now uses feincms3' TemplatePluginRenderer which makes the view code even simpler and shorter:

https://github.com/matthiask/feincms3-example/blob/master/app/pages/views.py