lachlansimpson / django-tutorial Goto Github PK

@datakid I was chatting with @DFFlanders the other day and he suggested that this Django lesson could be preceded by a spreadsheets lesson. In other words, you'd do some spreadsheet basics and lead them to a point (via a research data example) where using a spreadsheet gets a little cumbersome/awkward. This would ensure that everyone really gets why using a database via django can be so useful.

Data Carpentry already has a spreadsheets lesson and I'm thinking this django lesson could potentially belong in the Data Carpentry repo one day, so we certainly don't need to be developing a spreadsheet lesson of our own at this stage.

@datakid At the end of Tutorial 2 you suggest that Tutorial 3 will introduce some power functions. I've now developed the Research Platforms app up to the point that I've used all the concepts introduced in Tutorials 1 and 2 and there's one thing I feel like I desperately need at the beginning of Tutorial 3 - some power functions for dealing with choices. In particular, I'd like to be able to:

• Select multiple choices instead of just one (e.g. a person might have more than one dietary requirement)
• Allow one choice field to depend on another (e.g. once I've selected my home institution the campus choices should only include those associated with that home institution)
• Sort the drop-down choice menus

With respect to the first two, there is a multiselectfield library here which is based on this snippet and a smart_selects library here. As a novice django user I'm not sure whether I should try and install those libraries or whether I should literally just cut and paste useful snippets that I find (it seems like django snippets are a thing?). And if I should try and install those libraries, how does one go about doing that?