Flask-Squirrel

The squirrel collects your nuts and stores them into your SQL database so it is a REST API which accesses your database. It is based on Flask, Flask-RESTful and Flask-SQLAlchemy.

Major benefits:

• The database data is formatted as a JSON which can be used by the great jQuery library DataTables.
• Multilanguage
• Allows custom business logic
• Basic document/file upload support
• No HTML is generated - REST API only (JSON)
• Server-side filtering
• The "Orderings" demo provides a web frontend application which is quite generic.

Note: this project is in testing stage. Any contributions are welcome!

Also see the Read the Docs documentation which is under construction.

First Steps to Run the Demo

There is a small document management example to show how you can use Flask-Squirrel. The goal is to upload a document on a server and assign it to an ordering of material a small company uses for its projects.

Note: This demo needs at least Python 3.7 because of the function datetime.datetime.fromisoformat() for the initial DB creation. Flask-Squirrel itself also works with Python 3.6.

The following steps are made for Linux; for Windows or Mac you should adapt some paths in the configuration file. Do the project setup:

python3 --version
# should be at least 3.7 for running the demo

# go into your project directory
git clone https://github.com/ClNo/flask-squirrel.git
cd flask-squirrel

python3 -m venv venv    # if you have multiple versions: call python3.7 ..
source venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
python setup.py develop

To run the Python backend on port 5000 (automatically loads the configuration from orderings-config.json):

cd examples/orderings
python3 backend.py

You should get the following output of the backend:

INFO in flask_app: Overriding config item SECRET_KEY: dev -> _5#y2LF4Q8z-\xec]/
INFO in flask_app: Overriding config item SESSION_COOKIE_SAMESITE: None -> Lax
INFO in flask_app: Overriding config item SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE: False -> True
INFO in flask_app: Adding resource /orderings-api/resource-view-spec to routes...
INFO in flask_app: Adding table /orderings-api/suppliers to routes...
INFO in flask_app: Adding table /orderings-api/projects to routes...
INFO in flask_app: Adding table /orderings-api/users to routes...
INFO in flask_app: Adding table /orderings-api/orderings to routes...
INFO in flask_app: Adding table /orderings-api/documents to routes...
INFO in flask_app: Adding table /orderings-api/config to routes...
INFO in flask_app: Adding resource /orderings-api/upload to routes...
INFO in flask_app: Adding resource /orderings-api/login-token to routes...
INFO in backend: Adding resource /orderings-api/config-api to routes...
INFO in backend: Adding resource /orderings-api/upload-filelist to routes...
 * Serving Flask app "flask_squirrel.startup.flask_app" (lazy loading)
 * Environment: production
   WARNING: This is a development server. Do not use it in a production deployment.
   Use a production WSGI server instead.
 * Debug mode: on
 * Running on http://0.0.0.0:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)

Now you can test the REST API with a tool like curl:

curl 'http://127.0.0.1:5000/orderings-api/users?get=data_spec&version=1&lang=en'

The result contains the data but as well editor specification (argument "get=data_spec"):

{
    "data": [
        {
            "users": {
                "iduser": 1,
                "username": "admin",
                "firstname": "John",
                "lastname": "Test",
                "credential_hash": "----------",
                "authentication_level": 10,
                "state": "active"
            },
            "DT_RowId": 1,
            "users_state": {
                "name": "active"
            }
        },
        {
            "users": {
                "iduser": 2,
                "username": "u1",
                "firstname": "Fred",
                "lastname": "Fish",
                "credential_hash": "----------",
                "authentication_level": 10,
                "state": "active"
            },
            "DT_RowId": 2,
            "users_state": {
                "name": "active"
            }
        },
        {
            "users": {
                "iduser": 3,
                "username": "u2",
                "firstname": "John",
                "lastname": "Test",
                "credential_hash": "----------",
                "authentication_level": 0,
                "state": "active"
            },
            "DT_RowId": 3,
            "users_state": {
                "name": "active"
            }
        },
        {
            "users": {
                "iduser": 4,
                "username": "u3",
                "firstname": "Lance",
                "lastname": "Armstrong",
                "credential_hash": "----------",
                "authentication_level": 0,
                "state": "inactive"
            },
            "DT_RowId": 4,
            "users_state": {
                "name": "inactive"
            }
        }
    ],
    "options": {
        "users.state": [
            {
                "label": "(State)",
                "value": null
            },
            {
                "label": "active",
                "value": "active"
            },
            {
                "label": "inactive",
                "value": "inactive"
            }
        ]
    },
    "filters": null,
    "editor-filters": null,
    "translation": {}
}

You can also access the backend with a JavaScript web application in a browser with the URL http://127.0.0.1:5000/orderings/index.html. Flask acts as file server which provides the html/css/js files and images.

Note: Flask-Squirrel is made to work with the very good browser component DataTables. You can download a trial version of the DataTables Editor and copy it into examples/orderings/frontend/DatatablesEditor/datatables.min.js and datatables.min.css .

If you have the DataTables Editor you are able to create, edit and delete the table rows from the web application:

To make any changes in the protected tables you can login as admin / adm123 which is also specified in configuration file orderings-config.json.

Note: Even the Orderings demo is a bit raw it can be used to publish any kind of SQL tables! The JS scripts get mostly everything from the Flask-Squirrel backend and therefore you can do already much with this demo code!