ReferenceΒΆ

@PixieApp: Python class annotation to denote that a class is a PixieApp.

@route: Python method annotation to denote that a method is a view. The contract is that when a method is annotated as a route, it must provide an HTML fragment for the framework to display.

The default view must have a route with no arguments e.g. @route(). Any other route can have multiple key-value pairs, e.g., @route(clicked="true", state1="foo"). When executing a kernel request, the PixieApp dispatcher will try to find the best view match based on its route arguments according to the following rules:

  • The routes with the most arguments are always evaluated first.
  • All arguments must match for a route to be selected.
  • If the route is not found, then the default route is selected.
  • Each key of the route arguments can be either a transient state (options passed for the duration of the request) or persisted (field of the PixieApp class that remains present until explicitly changed).

Contract for the method defined as a view: The method must provide an HTML fragment that can contain Jinja2 templating constructs (see http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/dev/templates/ for more details on Jinja2 templating).

There are two ways of supplying these fragments:

  1. Simply return a static string with the HTML fragment.
  2. Use either self._addHTMLTemplate or self._addHTMLTemplateString. Use one of these methods when you want to pass custom arguments to the Jinja2 template interpreter.

Note

passing custom arguments to Jinja2 is an advanced feature that is rarely needed.