How to replicate/copy complex pages

[Brygg Ullmer]

Greetings!

We've been greatly enjoying getting going with Mezzanine toward creating several new web spaces.  One challenge we've run into is how to replicate/duplicate/copy a complex page, for subsequent modification.  E.g., the following page:

https://cc.cct.lsu.edu/groups/tangviz/papers/

... uses the "codex" MezzaTheme portfolio page type.  

https://secure.mezzathe.me/theme/codex/#.VMSFaGR4p_Y

We'd like to make a series of copies that preserve subsets of the contents, but haven't found a mechanism for this.  Can anyone advice on the cleanest way (ideally through the admin web UI) to realize this?

Appreciated!

Brygg Ullmer

Louisiana State University

[Josh Cartmell]

Hi Brygg, unfortunately I don't think there is a way to do what you described right now.  To be clear, you would want to do something like:

Page 1 | Item 1, Item 2, Item 3, Item 4

and then create a copy like:

Page 1 Copy | Item 1, Item 3, Item 4

Is that correct?

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[Brygg Ullmer]

Josh,

Many thanks for your message -- warmly appreciated!

Yes, your description is accurate.  After posting my message, I realized aspects may be specific to the Codex MezzaTheme.  In a dump of the MySQL dbase, I see:

REPLACE INTO `codex_portfolioitem` (`id`, `_order`, `portfolio_id`, `content`, `title`, `href`, `featured_image`) VALUES

... followed by the content of the associations.  While I suspect there are both Python and MySQL (PostgreSQL, etc.) ways of doing this, am I correct in gathering a SQL query of the existing page items, followed by a SQL insertion of said items in association with the new page "copy," may be the current "state of the art?"

Warmly appreciated!

Brygg

[Josh Cartmell]

I'm sure that you could do it directly with SQL but you also could write a script that could do it with Django's orm, something like (I haven't tested this so it may require some tweaking):

from copy import deepcopy

def copy_page(portfolio):

    portfolio_copy = deepcopy(portfolio)
    portfolio_copy.id = None
    portfolio_copy.save()

    for item in portfolio.items.all():

        # replace the next line with actual logic that determines if the item shouldn't be copied

        if (do_not_copy):
            continue
        item_copy = deepcopy(item)
        item_copy.portfolio = portfolio_copy
        item_copy.save()

If you wanted to get really fancy you could even hook this up to the admin somehow, rather than running it at the command line

[Brygg Ullmer]

Josh,

Many thanks for the very helpful code example!  Using such a variation (as opposed to direct SQL) does appear cleaner and more in keeping with Django.

My apologies for the newcomer question, but -- per these links:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/ref/django-admin/

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/testing/tools/

... am I correct in understanding that Django orm scripts of the style you illustrate/describe may typically be accessed with a call like:

python /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/bin/django-admin.py shell --plain --settings=./mysite.settings

followed by code that begins with:

from django.test import Client

Warmly appreciated!

Brygg 

[Ken Bolton]

Hi Brygg,

Your understanding is correct, though in my experience more often formulated so:

$ python manage.py shell

Let me take a moment to plug the excellent django-extensions module. In your python environment, `pip install django-extensions` will download and add the module to your python path. Mezzanine (and Cartridge) will take advantage of this module if installed.

$ python manage.py shell_plus

The above command will get your python shell up and load your models for you. It can be a huge time-saver, particularly if you are making changes and trying to test them in the shell.

hth!

- ken

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[Brygg Ullmer]

Kenneth,

Many thanks for this!  I have installed django-extensions; it looks very promising.  Based on your and Josh's advice, I'm now tending to dump the codex_portfolioitem table to JSON or YAML, then use a variation of your two django-native suggestions to selectively import items back to the target pages.  I'll update (probably in a week or so) as this rolls out.

with appreciation,

Brygg