Agora

Agora is a forum for ideas. It is a simple, blog-like application, with support for multiple authors.

It is developed for a class curriculum, and is not intended for real deployment, although it could serve some purpose.

There are two classes--Author and Idea. A forum can have zero or more authors. Each author can have zero or more ideas.

Agora uses SQLAlchemy for a persistence layer. You need a valid SQLAlchemy session to initialize agora.

Usage

Set up SQLAlchemy session

>>> from agora.models import Base

>>> from sqlalchemy import create_engine
>>> from sqlalchemy.orm import scoped_session, sessionmaker

>>> engine = create_engine('sqlite:///:memory:')
>>> Base.metadata.create_all(engine)

>>> DBSession = scoped_session(sessionmaker())
>>> DBSession.configure(bind=engine)

Forum Basics

>>> from agora import Forum
>>> forum = Forum(DBSession)

A new forum has no authors or ideas.

>>> forum.get_authors()
[]
>>> forum.get_ideas()
[]

To add an idea, you first need an author.

To add a new author, pass a username, fullname, and email to the add_author method.

>>> forum.add_author(username='schmoe', fullname='Joe Schmoe', email='schmoe@example.com')
1
>>> forum.add_author(username='misinformation', fullname='Miss Information', email='misinformation@example.com')
2

Notice that the method returns the author's id.

We now have authors.

>>> forum.get_authors()
[Joe Schmoe, March 02, 2016, Miss Information, March 02, 2016]

You can access authors by id.

>>> forum.get_author(1)
Joe Schmoe, March 02, 2016

To add a new idea, pass a title, idea, and author_id to the add_idea method.

>>> forum.add_idea(title='First Idea!', idea='This is my idea.', author_id=1)
1

>>> forum.add_idea(title='My First Idea!', idea='This is my idea.', author_id=2)
2

>>> forum.add_idea(title='Another Idea!', idea='This is my idea.', author_id=1)
3

>>> forum.add_idea(title='Another Idea!', idea='This is my idea.', author_id=2)
4

We now have ideas.

>>> forum.get_ideas()
[First Idea!, Joe Schmoe, March 02, 2016, My First Idea!, Miss Information, March 02, 2016, Another Idea!, Joe Schmoe, March 02, 2016, Another Idea!, Miss Information, March 02, 2016]

You can access ideas by id.

>>> forum.get_idea(1)
First Idea!, Joe Schmoe, March 02, 2016

You can also access ideas with filters.

>>> forum.get_ideas(filters={'author': forum.get_author(1)})
[First Idea!, Joe Schmoe, March 02, 2016, Another Idea!, Joe Schmoe, March 02, 2016]

>>> forum.get_ideas(filters={'title': 'First Idea!'})
[First Idea!, Joe Schmoe, March 02, 2016]

>>> forum.get_ideas(filters={'title': 'Another Idea!'})
[Another Idea!, Joe Schmoe, March 02, 2016, Another Idea!, Miss Information, March 02, 2016]

>>> forum.get_ideas(filters={'author': forum.get_author(2), 'title': 'Another Idea!'})
[Another Idea!, Miss Information, March 02, 2016]

You can delete ideas by id.

>>> forum.delete_idea(1)
1

>>> forum.get_ideas()
[My First Idea!, Miss Information, March 02, 2016, Another Idea!, Joe Schmoe, March 02, 2016, Another Idea!, Miss Information, March 02, 2016]

Initialize Database

There is a script provided to initialize the database. It is installed into the bin directory of your virtualenv. You must pass it a valid SQLAlchemy database URI.

$ initialize_agora_db <database_uri>

$ initialize_agora_db sqlite:///agora.sqlite

You can also use the script to seed the database with a sample author and two ideas, if you append the word seed to the command.

$ initialize_agora_db sqlite:///agora.sqlite seed