Gramex 1.31 Release Notes

Installation

Gramex is now on PyPi. Installing is much easier. Just run:

pip install --verbose gramex

API integration

The Guide features more demos of how to use external APIs.

1. Speech query application shows the most relevant dashboard when you ask it a question. By @santhosh.j and @athibanraj.t.
2. Google Cloud NLP API helps analyze entities in text and to estimate the sentiment.
3. Google Search API retrieves a few search results at a time.

Charts

FormHandler supports Vega charts. You can use the full power of Vega and Vega-Lite charts with just configuration. Here’s an example:

<script src="../../formhandler/vega?_format=barchart"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/vega@3.2.1/build/vega.min.js"></script>

FormHandler directory browsing

FormHandler can go beyond files and databases. Our plan it to integrate with Spark, cloud APIs and other sources. For now, you can browse files in directories, converting FormHandler into a simple file explorer.

Alert preview

Alerts now support previews. You can see what alert emails look like before sending them out. We plan to improve this app into a full-fledged mailing and scheduling application.

Note: Until Gramex 1.30, emails without a schedule were sent on startup. Now, emails are sent only if they have an explicit schedule, or are triggered manually.

Log viewer

Log viewer ignores static content (like images, JS/CSS scripts, etc), and displays more friendly HTTP statuses.

Developer updates

Prevent URL conflicts

When 2 URLs from different applications have the same key, only one of them work. You can use YAML wildcard keys which generate random key names to prevent this.

url:
  my-app-$*: # The '$*' is replaced by a random value
    pattern: ...

Also, if the developer specifies an invalid URL regular expression, like /dir/*, Gramex mentions this as an error and continues. (It used to stop processing all configurations earlier.)

Path arguments

When you have a URL pattern with regular expression wild cards like this:

url:
    path:
        pattern: /path/(.*)
        ...

… this matches any URL beginning with /path/, e.g. /path/abc. To access the abc, use handler.path_args[0]. This lets you create flexible alternatives to URL query parameters in FunctionHandler. For example:

• /sales?city=London can be converted to /sales/London
• /sales?country=UK&city=London can be /sales/UK/London

This is available to all handlers. FormHandler also allows its use as part of its parameters. For example, with pattern: /sales/(\w+), you can use this query:

query: SELECT {_0}, SUM(revenue) FROM sales GROUP BY {_0}

The {_0} refers to the portion after /sales/. So /sales/city returns the revenue by the city column, while /sales/country returns the revenue by the country column.

HTTP error reporting

The default HTTP 500 error handler (raised when the server makes a mistake) displays a reason code, if one is available. Gramex now consistently uses HTTP reason codes for error reporting.

We also have a template for HTTP 400 errors - which are raised when the user sends a bad request.

Lato font

The Google Font Lato is now available on the Gramex UI components.

Repository moved

The Gramex code base has moved from s.anand/gramex to cto/gramex. If you have any git repos pointing to Gramex, edit the .git/config file and update the location.

Stats

• Code base: 23,896 lines (python: 14,809, javascript: 1132, tests: 8,060)
• Test coverage: 79%

Upgrade

To upgrade Gramex, run:

pip install --verbose gramex==1.31

This downloads Chromium and other front-end dependencies. That may take time.