jQuery expanding textarea

2010-12-18T16:13:00.001+01:00

I've been using dojo for some time now as my default javascript toolkit. From some days I'm giving a look at jQuery becouse of its popularity. It's not always true that popular = good but it seems is not this the case. As soon as I started using it I've founded it easy, simple and clean. From dojo I often use the dijit TextArea widget. This widget is a nice beast that autoexpand itself to fit the text content inside. No scroll bars will be showed and it is really nice in some context. I've googled for a similar widget into the jQuery ecosystem but, to my surprise, I have not found anything equiparable in terms of quality. So in short, I decided to port the dojo one to jQuery.

Example:
Here an example (type some lines into the textarea below)

Usage

<script src="jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script src="jquery.exptextarea.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>

Now you can select a text area using jQuery selector and turn it into an expandable one

<textarea></textarea>
<script>
$('textarea').expandingTextArea();
</script>

Download
I've shared the code with you on github:
https://github.com/ferama/jquery-expanding-textarea/

Runtime dynamic models with django

2010-11-01T15:49:00.013+01:00

I've developed web apps for some years now using php, mostly old man style coding using raw PEAR. As soon as things growed up I discovered that the time to move was arrived. I've done some research and come to django framework and I loved It :) I'm still learning (I don't have any production app yet) but the alchemy is there so I think it will be my default choice soon.

So what those dynamic models are?
In django you normally create models into models.py file for each app. So you must write the model class, but this isn't the only way to define a model in django. You can define models at runtime. You basically define a new python class at runtime using the python type module

Example:
Standard model definition:

class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    content = models.TextField()

dynamic model definition

import type

dct = {
    "__module__": "appname.models",
    "title": models.CharField(max_length=255),
    "content": models.TextField()
}
Post = type('Post', (models.Model,), dct)

What I'm doing here is defining a new class named Post. I'm comparing the two differnt ways to define the django model. In first case I have used the common way of defining a new django model. In the second I have used the python type module to define the model at runtime. The class inherit from models.Model class and have the attributes defined into dct. This is tested to work with django 1.2.3. The dictnonary dct, contains all class attrs, so it can contain custom method also and even more. Note the "__module__" key: it is needed by the django admin interface to work and probably by something else so don't forget to put it. The value appname.models is refered to the model.py module where to put the runtime defined class. Note also that syncdb won't sync dynamic defined models so you must already have the model table on database.

Example:

def post_unicode(self):
    return self.name

dct['__unicode__'] = post_unicode

We can even register the new defined type to the django admin interface

admin.site.register(Post)

I've discovered about dynamic models running on this page http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DynamicModels. The writer complain about the fact that this technique is not applicable to django >= 1 but it worked very well in my experiments. Only note that I've added __module__ key to the dict used to build the dynamic type

FerMenta

jQuery expanding textarea

Runtime dynamic models with django