docassemble

How to organize the playground in docassemble / best practices?

This isn't exactly the best stack overflow question because it's opinion-based, but I'm going to try to ask it in a way that will lend itself relatively to an answer with some degree of factuality (as opposed to opinion).

I know you can switch projects (https://docassemble.org/docs/playground.html#projects), which is of course very useful. What I'm thinking about in particular is that I have seen some tutorials that abstract code out of interviews in .py files -- this seems reasonably useful to me, not the least of all because of linting (tangent: is there a docassemble linter?).

Because of the way docassemble does inheritance, I think I would rather have my entire playground be one big directory with subdirectories for projects (rather than starting from scratch with new projects ... some of the .yml file, .py files, static files, etc. are probably able to be written in a way that they can be re-used across interviews and I'd love to do that in a way that's less clunky than re-importing them into a new project when I need them.

  1. Can we organize the playground in docassemble, or are we stuck with a one-level directory?
  2. If the playground can be organized (eg. into directories, subdirectories, etc.), are there any community-accepted or JHPyle-reccomended best-practices around that? (i.e. although I assume less formal, I'm thinking something like PEP) I know it's probably easy-enough to come up with a file naming convention with similar effect, but that's a bit hacky.
  3. Is in possible, as an alternative, to simply directly edit the packages?

The main thing I'd like to accomplish, and the main impetus for this question, is keeping my code DRY by using helper functions / helper .yml files.

Solution

  • The Playground is a simplified interface for people who are new to programming. It supports "projects" but does not support subdirectories. Advanced programmers can write their code in Python packages using a text editor and can use subdirectories under the data directory if they want to.