Chapter 5: Custom kanban view

Warning

It is highly recommended that you complete Chapter 3: Fields and Views before starting this chapter. The concepts introduced in Chapter 3, including views and examples, will be essential for understanding the material covered in this chapter.

We have gained an understanding of the numerous capabilities offered by the Flectra web framework. As a next step, we will customize a kanban view. This is a more complicated project that will showcase some non trivial aspects of the framework. The goal is to practice composing views, coordinating various aspects of the UI, and doing it in a maintainable way.

Bafien had the greatest idea ever: a mix of a kanban view and a list view would be perfect for your needs! In a nutshell, he wants a list of customers on the left of the task’s kanban view. When you click on a customer on the left sidebar, the kanban view on the right is filtered to only display orders linked to that customer.

Goal

Solutions

The solutions for each exercise of the chapter are hosted on the official Flectra tutorials repository.

1. Create a new kanban view

Since we are customizing the kanban view, let us start by extending it and using our extension in the kanban view for the tshirt orders.

Exercise

1. Extend the kanban view by extending the kanban controller and by creating a new view object.

2. Register it in the views registry under awesome_tshirt.customer_kanban.

3. Update the kanban arch to use the extended view. This can be done with the js_class attribute.

2. Create a CustomerList component

We will need to display a list of customers, so we might as well create the component.

Exercise

1. Create a CustomerList component which only displays a div with some text for now.

2. It should have a selectCustomer prop.

3. Create a new template extending (XPath) the kanban controller template to add the CustomerList next to the kanban renderer. Give it an empty function as selectCustomer for now.

4. Subclass the kanban controller to add CustomerList in its sub-components.

5. Make sure you see your component in the kanban view.

3. Load and display data

Exercise

1. Modify the CustomerList component to fetch a list of all customers in onWillStart.

2. Display the list in the template with a t-foreach.

3. Whenever a customer is selected, call the selectCustomer function prop.

4. Update the main kanban view

Exercise

1. Implement selectCustomer in the kanban controller to add the proper domain.

2. Modify the template to give the real function to the CustomerList selectCustomer prop.

Since it is not trivial to interact with the search view, here is a quick snippet to help:

selectCustomer(customer_id, customer_name) {
   this.env.searchModel.setDomainParts({
      customer: {
            domain: [["customer_id", "=", customer_id]],
            facetLabel: customer_name,
      },
   });
}

5. Only display customers which have an active order

There is a has_active_order field on res.partner. Let us allow the user to filter results on customers with an active order.

Exercise

1. Add an input of type checkbox in the CustomerList component, with a label “Active customers” next to it.

2. Changing the value of the checkbox should filter the list on customers with an active order.

6. Add a search bar to the customer list

Exercise

Add an input above the customer list that allows the user to enter a string and to filter the displayed customers, according to their name.

Tip

You can use the fuzzyLookup function to perform the filter.

See also

• Code: The fuzzylookup function

• Example: Using fuzzyLookup

7. Refactor the code to use t-model

To solve the previous two exercises, it is likely that you used an event listener on the inputs. Let us see how we could do it in a more declarative way, with the t-model directive.

Exercise

1. Make sure you have a reactive object that represents the fact that the filter is active (something like this.state = useState({ displayActiveCustomers: false, searchString: ''})).

2. Modify the code to add a getter displayedCustomers which returns the currently active list of customers.

3. Modify the template to use t-model.

8. Paginate customers!

Exercise

1. Add a pager in the CustomerList, and only load/render the first 20 customers.

2. Whenever the pager is changed, the customer list should update accordingly.

This is actually pretty hard, in particular in combination with the filtering done in the previous exercise. There are many edge cases to take into account.