How can I return a report to the user in the view?

[Francis Windram]

Hi All,

This is a bit of a tricky one to explain. Essentially I have a custom validation module which allows one to check whether their csv for upload is in the expected format.

The validation module generates and returns a text-based report as a single string e.g. "Line1\nLine2\nLine3"

The csv is uploaded via a view & controller as below.

Controller:

def validate_test():
    report = ""
    form = SQLFORM.factory(
        Field('csvfile', 'upload'), table_name="dataset_upload")
    if form.validate():
        origin_filename = request.vars.csvfile.filename
        temp_filename = form.vars.csvfile
        with open(request.folder + "uploads/" + form.vars.csvfile) as candidate_src:
            candidate_reader = csv.reader(candidate_src, quotechar='"')
            candidate = [x for x in candidate_reader]
            # Process
        logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)
        report = validatemodule.validate(candidate, origin_filename)
    if form.process().accepted:
        response.flash = 'form accepted'
    elif form.errors:
        response.flash = 'form has errors'
    return dict(form=form, report=report)

View:

{{extend 'layout.html'}}

<div style="background: linear-gradient(240deg, lightgrey, whitesmoke)" class="jumbotron">
    {{=form}}
    {{=report}}
</div>

Now for some reason whilst the report does get returned to the view, all line breaks in the report string seem to be ignored:

I'm sure there's just something that I'm missing here, but even when digging through the HTML helper functions I'm just not finding what I need.

Anyone got an idea on what's going on?

Thanks!

[Leonel Câmara]

You have to either convert those '\n' into <br> or paragraph tags by doing something like this in the view

{{=DIV(*[P(line) for line in report.split('\n')])}}

or put the report inside a PRE tag to tell the browser the text comes preformatted

<div style="background: linear-gradient(240deg, lightgrey, whitesmoke)" class="jumbotron">
    {{=form}}


    <pre>{{=report}}</pre>
</div>







[Francis Windram]

Brilliant, thank you! The pre tags worked exactly as required.