Skeleton Web App

Installation Process

Clone this repository using your favorite method, then:

$ python3 -m venv compendium-v2
$ .compendium-v2/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ tox -e py39

Overview

This module implements a Flask-based webservice and in-browser React front-end.

The webservice communicates with the front end over HTTP. Responses to valid requests are returned as JSON messages. The server will therefore return an error unless application/json is in the Accept request header field.

Configuration

This app allows specification of a few example configuration parameters. These parameters should be stored in a file formatted similarly to config-example.json, and the name of this file should be stored in the environment variable SETTINGS_FILENAME when running the service.

Building the web application

For instructions on building the React frontend see <name>-webapp/README.md.

Running this module

This module has been tested in the following execution environments:

• As an embedded Flask application. For example, the application could be launched as follows:

$ export FLASK_APP=compendium_v2.app
$ export SETTINGS_FILENAME=config-example.json
$ flask run

See https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.1.x/deploying/ for best practices about running in production environments.

Importing the historical data

Pip install can use the setup.py file to register the click cli commands:

pip install --editable .
legacy-survey-publisher

To import the 2022 data to the new datamodel for prefilling the 2023 surveys:

pip install --editable .
conversion

Creating a db migration after editing the sqlalchemy models

cd compendium_v2
flask db revision --autogenerate -m "description"

Then go to the created migration file to make any necessary additions, for example to migrate data. Also see https://alembic.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/autogenerate.html#what-does-autogenerate-detect-and-what-does-it-not-detect Flask-migrate sets compare_type=True by default. We use alembic-postgresql-enum to support auto discovery of and applying enum changes.

Note that starting the application applies all pending migrations. Normally this also happens when running flask db commands such as flask db downgrade, but we've disabled this in our create_app function.

Editing a newly created survey

A new survey can be created and inspected from the survey admin page. If you need to make edits, do the following:

pip install --editable .
dump_survey_model

This will create a json dump of the new survey in the migrations/surveymodels folder. Create a new branch, commit this file in git, and make the edits, which should of course also be committed. Create an empty db migration with flask db revision, copy the upgrade command from b3e1c5149181_insert_survey_model_2022.py, set the year, and copy the contents of the json file into the migration. Merge this back and deploy.