Gramex 1.76 release notes

Gramex 1.76 has Python 3.9 support, schedulers that run every second, and more tutorial videos.

Gramex is ready for Python 3.9

Gramex only worked on Python 3.7 so far. This was mainly Tornado 6, SQLAlchemy 1.4 and Pandas 1.0 had breaking changes.

Rather than break backward compatibility, Gramex has been re-written to work with the older and newer versions of all of these libraries. Specifically, it works with:

• Tornado 5 and Tornado 6
• SQLAlchemy 1.3 and SQLAlchemy 1.4
• Pandas 0.x and Pandas 1.x

In future releases, the Gramex Conda package will migrate to Python 3.9, allowing you to use:

• Assignment expressions like if n := len(a):
• f-strings with = like f'{value=}'
• Dictionary merge, e.g. {'x':1} | {'y':2}
• asyncio.run()
• … and much more

Schedulers run every second

Earlier, schedulers and alerts could run every minute, at most.

But it wasn’t possible to run a scheduler every second, or 90 seconds.

Now, schedulers and alerts support an every: kwarg that specifies the frequency of runs.

For example, this schedule runs every 1 minute 30 seconds:

schedule:
  run-at-specific-interval:
    function: print(time.time())
    every: 1m 30s

Tutorial videos

The Gramex Guide now has video tutorials explaining most features in several pages:

• FunctionHandler
• FileHandler
• FormHandler
• CaptureHandler
• PPTXHandler
• Caching
• Debugging Gramex

Bug fixes

• FormHandler MongoDB engine supports PUT/POST/DELETE on all versions of PyMongo
• FormHandler ServiceNow engine accepts the table: parameter
• CaptureHandler handles PhantomJS timeout correctly, using the PhamtomJS API
• gramex.cache.open(excel_file) accepts the name= for named range (not the incorrect defined_name=)
• gramex.data.insert() converts empty ?args= to None instead of empty strings, making FormHandler insert operations work across numbers and strings

Backward compatibility & security

Gramex 1.76 is backward compatible with previous releases unless the release notes say otherwise. Automated builds test this.

Every Gramex release is tested for security vulnerabilities using the following tools.

1. Bandit tests for back-end Python vulnerabilities. See Bandit results
2. npm-audit tests for front-end JavaScript vulnerabilities. See npm-audit results
3. Snyk for front-end and back-end vulnerabilities. See Synk results
4. ClamAV for anti-virus scans. See ClamAV results

Statistics

The Gramex code base has:

• 19,546 lines of Python (17 more than 1.75)
• 3,360 lines of JavaScript (1 more than 1.75)
• 12,774 lines of test code (8 less than 1.75)
• 89% test coverage (same as 1.75)

How to install

See the Gramex installation and upgrade instructions.

Note: Gramex 1.76 works with Python 3.7+ but has been fully tested only with Python 3.7.