I am looking for a simple way to create geographical maps in Django, in which I could then select, highlight and annotate countries or groups thereof.
"Annotate": insert a label displaying textual information about the said country.
Is there anything that comes to mind?
Many thanks
EDIT: I checked GeoDjango already and it looks like much work in order to get where I need to. Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to minimize my own investment in learning new tools, but for this project, I have a trade-off between time allocated to learning and the relative importance of this geographical feature in my app. It's more of a nice-to-have feature I'd like to add to an already 'complete' app. So I wondered whether there exists a 'simpler' python library for this task.
I think this is more of a question for if there is a front-end library to elegantly handle this. However if you need to generate the maps you could try something like this
https://kartograph.org/
I have personally used this http://jvectormap.com/ and found it to be really good.
In your database you could just have a Countries model with any associated information you might need to display, and create a view to handle that appropriately.
Related
I need help/recommendation for creating an order like input form with MASTER inputs like (order no, date, customer name, address) along with DETAIL info in multiple rows like (Item no, Description, Qty, Rate, Amount).
I am using Admin-on-rest as front-end interface and Loopback for my backend api.
Being new to react/redux and still learning core concepts, I am getting a hard time in finding a good example/starting point to build this functionality. So far, I think this example based on redux-form can help in creating a custom component, but I am yet not competent enough to build this myself.
Any reference to a similar example or some simple code to get me started will be very helpful.
Ref. Image
I think you need this.
How to richly style AOR Edit page
The last answer on the page is a somewhat detailed guide on creating a custom edit component in AOR. Feel free to ask more questions here about how this will be done.
Looking at your design you will need to also think how this data will be updated at the API level. AOR itself will make a single request when you hit save. So how will your API handle updates to multiple models etc.
The design pattern is explained here:
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/design_pattern/filter_pattern.htm
I'm working on a software very similar to Adobe Lightroom or ACDSee but with different purposes. The user (photographer) is able to import thousands of images from his hard drive (it wouldn't be weird to have over 100k/200k images).
We have a side panel where users can create custom "filters" which are expressions like:
Does contain the keyword: "car"
AND
Does not contain the keyword "woods"
AND
(
Camera model is "Nikon D300s"
OR
Camera model is "Canon 7D Mark II"
)
AND
NOT
Directory is "C:\today_pictures"
You can get the idea from the above example.
We have a SQLite database where all image information is stored. The question is, should we load ALL Photo objects into memory from the database the first time the program is loaded and implement the Criteria/Filter design pattern as explained in the website cited above so our Criteria classes filter objects or is better to do the criteria classes actually generate an SQL query that is finally executed in order to retrieve only what's needed from the database?
We are developing the program with C++ (QT).
TL;DR: It's already properly implemented in SQLITE3, and look at how long that took. You'll face the same burden.
It'd be a horrible case of data duplication to read the data from the database and store it again in another data structure. Use database queries to implement the query that the user gave you. Let the database execute the query. That's what databases are for.
By reimplementing a search/query system for ~500k records, you'll be rewriting large chunks of a bog-standard database yourself. It'd be a mostly pointless exercise. SQLITE3 is very well tested and is essentially foolproof. It'll cost you thousands of hours of work to reimplement even a small fraction of its capabilities and reliability/resiliency. If that doesn't scream "reinventing the wheel", I don't know what does.
The database also allows you to very easily implement lookahead/dropdowns to aid the user in writing the query. For example, as you're typing out "camera model is", the user can have an option of autocompletion or a dropdown to select one or more models from.
You paid the "price" of a database, it'd be a shame for it all to go to waste. So, use it. It'll give you lots of leverage, and allow you to implement features two orders of magnitude faster than otherwise.
The pattern you've linked to is just a pattern. It doesn't mean that it's an exact blueprint of how to design your application to perform on real data. You'll be, eventually, fighting things such as concurrency (a file scanning thread running to update the metadata), indexing, resiliency in face of crashes, etc. In the end you'll end up with big chunks of SQLITE reimplemented for your particular application. 500k metadata records are nothing much, if you design your query translator well and support it with proper indexes, it'll work perfectly well.
Trying to build a simple like system in modx (which uses php snippets of code) I just need a button that logged in users can press which adds a 'like' to a resource.
Would it be best to update a custom table or TV? my thoughts are that if it is a template variable i can use getResource to sort by amount of likes.
Any thoughts on the best way to approach this or how to build this would help. My php knowledge is limited.
Depends how you are going to use it after and if you are storing more data than just a 'like' count. TV's are expensive on resources [even more so if you are going to whip through the entire resource set with getResources] so if you are going to do a lot of processing after the fact I would either look at a custom table ~or~ explore using property sets on your pages [I think it should be pretty easy to write a plugin that will update a page property]
I'd definitely go for a custom table.
While you could simply increment a numeric TV to count the amount of likes, you will come to a situation where anyone may be able to keep on liking a resource without limit - while you didn't specify the exact concept, that hardly can be desired. Using a custom table you could throw in a relational alias to the user ID that liked the resource, add a timestamp so you know when it happened, and let your fantasy run wild on additional features that are now open to you.
While not a hard requirement for custom tables, you will probably want to take the time to learn xPDO, which is the database abstraction layer MODX is based on. There's a great tutorial on the RTFM which walks you through it.
I have a request to return a list of the most popular search terms used when searching a Sitecore site.
I have no idea how to implement this sort of function using Sitecore or whether Sitecore has this kind of functionality all ready. I can't find any documentation detailing this.
I am currently using search based of the LuceneSearch module (http://trac.sitecore.net/LuceneSearch) but altered to bind to a ListView for easy pagination.
At the moment I am probably just going to build a standalone function/class to update an XML file or something unless someone is able to point me in the correct direction...?
I would frankly use OMS for that - this is what it is designed to do. No need of separate database. Just register the search events via API with OMS. There is an out of the box Search report. May require some tweaking, but this seems to be the most out of the box solution.
Take a look here for more details.
I don't know of any standard functionality in Sitecore that would help you achieve this, so you will probably have to approach this from ground up - unless someone else in here is able to point to a package deal somewhere :-)
Solving this, really breaks down into two tasks
1) Collecting search term information. Whenever a user enters a search term in the searchbox that I assume you have; normalise it and store it in a SQL table (essentially a [term] [count] type table. Update the counter on terms you already store.
By normalising, I mean lowercasing it and so on - possibly breaking each search term (word) down and storing them one for one if that is what your solution calls for (probably not the route I would go)
2) Realtime retreiving information from the table, based on what the user is typing in the searchbox. Assuming you want some sort of "amazon-like" - also found on almost all major search engines nowadays - autocompletion. I normally implement these in a web service that then gets called by Ajax, JQuery or whatever rich client implementation you prefer.
As for updating an XML file, I think locking issues and performance would kill that solution; though it could perhaps be made to work on a very small scale.
Sorry that I can't be more specific in my response, but your question is very open-ended.
Very interesting question. One thing you could do it have another database to store these search queries. An insert into this DB would not be very difficult and would get around the issue of locking on a XML file. Maybe insert the search query into a DB table then to get the top results just pull the top x rows ordered by that query field. As Mark Cassidy said before, maybe normalize the data before inserting it.
You could isolate this work on your search layout (or sublayout) so it runs on a specific part of the site, not on every page.
Sitecore has an out of the box "site search" report in the executive insight dashboard, this will give you an indication of what search terms are driving the most visits and of course engagement value.
You just need to configure it by registering a page event on the search page and passing the query otherwise sitecore wouldnt know what form field constitutes a search. See this post it explains it in more detail. For more information you can download the analytics configuration reference document from sdn.http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/65/engagement_analytics_configuration_reference_sc65-usletter.pdf
And dont forget for performance sitecore caches the reports at various levels so during development it may be handy to know how to force a cache update, I talk about this in the following blog post:
http://andytsitecore.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/sitecore-dms-and-analytics.html
I'm trying to solve the relational model in order to make a Django app.
I't will be something like a McDonald's crew scheduler. I mean the grid with colored pins marking who will be working at a given hour a given weekday.
I did try to Google out some example, but I didn't find anything. I need some theory/bibliography in order to build up my model and code it into my app.
Thanks in advance
From the short description, you probably wouldn't have just one model in your app.
From your question I'm assuming you don't have a lot of experience with databases... Here are a few suggestions:
Start here because if you don't understand the basic principles of database design, foreign keys, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, etc etc etc; you will have a hard time designing your Django models.
It would be nice to learn SQL too. Django models are supposed to insulate you from it, but in reality it is using SQL underneath and knowing SQL will enable you to check and fix performance issues in the future. There are some resources online too. And if you are using SQLite, learn its syntax too.
The above is stuff that you will be able to reuse regardless of the web framework you end up with. Django, Rails, the next big thing... whatever.
Study other people's data models. Here are several different ones - maybe you can find the one you are looking for (employee shifts? shift scheduling?).
Then read the basic django model documentation and really understand it. What django models are doing is mapping python objects to relational database tables (ORM is the acronym; Object Relational Mapping) and this article may very well help you in coming up with good designs.
Don't get discouraged. Everybody had to start somewhere.
Hope you find all you need. Have fun with Django.