Global variable vs. many db queries - flask

I will have a sidebar that appears on almost every page of my web app. The sidebar will have some drop-downs, which will consist of a total of say, 1000 different options, which are pulled from the db. Rather than doing the query to get these choices on every page load, I think it makes more sense to just do the query once, say in my config.py and store them in a variable that my views have access to. Is this OK? Is there a better way to accomplish this?

You could do that, but then you'd need to restart your Flask server every time you wanted to update the sidebar.
I'd use some other form of caching here. You could use Flask-Cache and memoize your query results. You can pick a nice long cache timeout, and then clear the cached result whenever you update the sidebar.

Related

Ember Substates with Ember data after store already has data

I have read Ember docs related to Substates etc and I understand how it works. In my current application my loading.hbs and other child loading.hbs templates work fine.
I just want to discuss a use case.
In my route A, in my model function I do fetchAll for my model.
I go to Route A, First time api request is sent and I see my loading screen.
now I navigate to some other route B.
now I come back to first route A, api request is sent again but this
time loading screen is not shown.
I want to develop my understanding here. Now the second time loading screen is not shown which tells us that store had data so there is no sense to put it on loading and after fetch store sent request to sync with backend.
QUESTION
Now I want to know if this is a default behaviour of Ember with Ember-data?
To show this loading screen, will I have to do something manually?
Ideally what I want is, if on second request data was fetched then show it and at the same time show loader to tell user that it is syncing with backend as well.
I know everything can be done manually, I don't want to reinvent the wheel or do things in non-conventional way. So I want to know best optimized solution for this as provided by Ember which an experienced Ember developer can help me understand.
Thanks in advance.
Now I want to know if this is a default behaviour of Ember with
Ember-data?
Yes, that's the default behavior of Ember data when you do a findRecord or findAll where shouldBackgroundReloadRecord or shouldBackgroundReloadAll event of the adapter respectively, is defaulted to true. You can turn this off by returning false and ensuring shouldReloadAll or shouldReloadRecord respectively are set at true to ensure the request always hits the API and not fetches from cache.
Ideally, showing data immediately on the screen is always advisable as it has a better UX in terms of giving the user a feel that data is already there and that some parts of the data is being fetched. Check here
To show this loading screen, will I have to do something manually?
You may also want to read this
To add further details after my own research, I found helpful and relevant details in Ember docs.This is all about caching.
If records were already there then promise will be resolved immediately that's why I don't see loading screen for already loaded record, at the same time Ember-Data syncs with backend as well and re-render the template.
Ember Model Docs
Caching
The store will automatically cache records for you. If a record had already been loaded, asking for it a second time will always return the same object instance. This minimizes the number of round-trips to the server, and allows your application to render its UI to the user as fast as possible.
For example, the first time your application asks the store for a person record with an ID of 1, it will fetch that information from your server.
However, the next time your app asks for a person with ID 1, the store will notice that it had already retrieved and cached that information from the server. Instead of sending another request for the same information, it will give your application the same record it had provided it the first time. This feature—always returning the same record object, no matter how many times you look it up—is sometimes called an identity map.
Using an identity map is important because it ensures that changes you make in one part of your UI are propagated to other parts of the UI. It also means that you don't have to manually keep records in sync—you can ask for a record by ID and not have to worry about whether other parts of your application have already asked for and loaded it.
One downside to returning a cached record is you may find the state of the data has changed since it was first loaded into the store's identity map. In order to prevent this stale data from being a problem for long, Ember Data will automatically make a request in the background each time a cached record is returned from the store. When the new data comes in, the record is updated, and if there have been changes to the record since the initial render, the template is re-rendered with the new information.

Django multiple admin modifying the same databases

i'm a total noob in django and just wondering if it's possible for an admin doing a same thing at the same time ? the only thing i get after looking at the django documentation is that it is possible to have two admins, but is it possible for the admins to do a task in the same databases at the same time ?
thanks for any help
You didn't made it clear that what do you actually want but:
If by admin you mean a superuser then yes you can have as many admins as you want.
Admins can change anything in database at the same time, but if you mean changing a specific row of a specific table at the same time, its not possible because of these reasons:
Its kinda impossible to save something at the same time. when both admins tries to save anything, the last request will be saved (the first one will be saved too but it changes to the last request)
and if there is any important data in database, you should block any other accesses to that row till the first user has done his job and saved the changes. (imagine a ticket reservation website which has to block any other users to be allowed to order the same ticket number till user finishes the order or cancel it.)
Also if you mean 2 different django projects using a single database, then its another yes. Basically they are like 2 different admins and all above conditions works for them too.

Django + memcached: generate cached pages automatically?

I am using Django + memcached and have a (hopefully) simple question.
My database is updated once a day. My pages are set to time out after 24 hours.
Is there a way to generate all the pages of the site into the cache once each day, just after the database is updated, in advance of any users coming to them?
I'd like the first user of the day to see the fast-loading cached version, not the slow-loading non-cached version.
I guess I could do this by scraping the site, but is there a neater way?
I think this is going to depend on how you have your urls.py set up.
If your urls are all either
A.) Straight out of the urls.py
or
B.) Predictable based on your database
If so, you might be able to use django_extensions show_urls
by doing python manage.py show_urls it outputs a list of all the urls.
From there, you can just capture them in a list and loop over them while hitting each one with a requests.get(some_url)
The output will tell if a variable is needed. If so, just replace it with the correct variable(s) and your done.

Ember choking upon encountering large data sets

Looking for a solution to an issue caused by large data sets forcing Ember to lock up the browser while it tries to process the data.
For pagination, I'm using tchak's handy pagination mixin to paginate approximately 13,000+ objects being loaded from a backend API.
The Ember Data objects contain an ID, one text attribute and several number attributes.
The problem is it takes close to a minute before the browser finishes processing the data, rendering the browser unusable in the meantime. Firefox even goes as far as to issue a warning that a script is using up all browser resources and suggests that script be terminated.
I've written my own pagination mixin that requests objects by range, i.e. items 10-25, and it works generally well except for one serious limitation: sorting. To sort the data, I need to make additional requests to the backend and reload the objects even if some of them have already been loaded.
I would love to be able to load all of the content upfront to simplify the process of sorting without doing additional requests to the backend API. I'm looking for guidance on how to tackle this issue but I'm open to an entirely alternative approach.
If nothing else, is it possible to reduce the resource footprint Ember places on the browser as it tries to load all 13k objects into the ArrayController?
I'm using Ember 1.0.0-pre2 with the latest Ember Data (currently at Revision 10).
On the backend is Rails 3.2.8.
Update I sidestepped the issue by loading data into an ArrayController property other than content. This brought the load times down from over a minute to only a few seconds. I then slice the requested number of items and load those into content. This works well for any number of items, at the cost of not being able to easily sort the data.
I suggest you take a look at Ember Table. The demo shows a table with 500 000 records and works very fast. Digging around the source code might help.
Can't you query a view from your db that handles the sorting? Pass in the sort conditions in the query string ?sortBy=name&sortAsc=true

accurate page view count in Django

What is a good approach to keeping accurate counts of how many times a page has been viewed?
I'm using Django. Specifically, I don't want refreshing the page to up the count.
As far as I'm aware, no browsers out there at the moment send any kind of message/header to the server saying whether the request was from a refresh or not.
The only way I can see to not count a user refreshing the page is to track the IPs and times that a user views a page, and then if the user last viewed the page less than 30 minutes ago, say, you would dismiss it as a refresh and not increment the page view count.
IMO most page refreshes should be counted as a page view anyway, as the only reason I have for refreshing is to see new data that might have been added, or the occasional accidental refresh/reloading after a browser crash (which the above method would dismiss).
You could give each user cookie, that expires at the end of the day, containing a unique number. If he reloads a page you can check wether she has been counted already that day.
You could create a table with unique visitors of the pages, e.g. VisitorIP + X-Forwarded-For content, User-Agent string along with a PageID of some sorts. If the data itself is irrelevant, you can create a md5/sha1 hash from these values (besides the PageID of course). Be warned however that this table will grow really fast.
I'd advise against setting cookies for that purpose. They have a limited size and with many visited pages by the user, you could reach that limit and make the solution unreliable. Also it makes it harder to cache such page on client-side (see Cacheability), since it becomes interactive content.
You can write a django middleware and catch request.url, then setup a table with url / accesses columns. Beware of transactions for concurrent update.
If you have load problems, you can use memcached with incr or add function and periodicaly update the database table to avoid transaction locks.