Question

Platform: Google App Engine (Python)
Database: Google Cloud SQL

I basically have a simple webpage with a sidebar and a main view. The sidebar basically consists of a set of records from a database and when I click on one of them, I want more detailed information to be pulled from the database and displayed in the main view.

I tried using def get(self) in the handler, but the variable is not being read. Is it possible to use self.request.get(‘variable’) in a def get(self)? Is there otherwise any way to pass a variable from a def post(self) to a def get(self)?

Below is most of the code that I am using. Apart from the code below, I am passing the results out to a template, which is then fetched once more using AJAX. That part works as expected.

// HTML code

<table class="query-results user">
<tbody>
{% autoescape on %}
{% for row in user_queries %}
<tr class="query-results">
  <td class="query-user">
    <img class="query-user-avatar" src="../img/avatars/{{ row.1 }}_32x32x32.png"><br />
  </td>
  <td class="query-main" data-queryid="{{ row.8 }}">
    <span class="query-title">{{ row.2 }}</span><br />{{ row.3 }}</br>{{ row.0 }} || {{ row.5 }} ago
  </td>
</tr>
{% endfor %}
{% endautoescape %}
</tbody>
</table> 

// AJAX – send variable to QueryTab Handler:

$("td.query-main").live('click', function(){
  var queryid = $(this).data("queryid");
    var dataString = 'queryId='+ queryid;
    $.ajax({  
      type: "GET",  
      url: "/querytab",  
      data: dataString,
      success: function () { alert("data sent: " + dataString) }
      });  
    return false;
});

Python Code:

class QueryTab(webapp2.RequestHandler):
  def get(self):
    query_id = self.request.get('queryId')

    fmt = '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'

    conn = rdbms.connect(instance=_INSTANCE_NAME, database='userPrefs')
    cursor = conn.cursor()
    cursor.execute('SELECT q.userNickname, a.avatar, q.queryName, q.queryDescription, q.queryValue, q.dateCreated, q.dateLastUpdated, q.activeFlag, q.uniqueId, q.entryID FROM queries AS q LEFT JOIN avatarPrefs AS a ON q.userNickname = a.userNickname WHERE q.activeFlag ="true" AND q.uniqueId = %s ORDER BY q.dateLastUpdated DESC LIMIT 6', (query_id))
    self_query = [[str(row[0]), str(row[1]), str(row[2]), str(row[3]), str(row[4]), str(timesince(datetime.strptime(str(row[5]), fmt))), str(timesince(datetime.strptime(str(row[6]), fmt))), str(row[7]), str(row[8]), str(row[9])] for row in cursor.fetchall()]

    template_file_name = 'templates/querytab.html'
    template_values = {
      'self_query': self_query,
      'query_id': query_id,
    }

    path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), template_file_name)
    self.response.out.write(template.render(path, template_values))
    conn.close()

Answer 1

At the time, I wasn’t as adept yet with AJAX, so didn’t quite understand the callback functionality. What I ended up using was something along the lines of:

$('td.query-main').live('click', function() {
  var queryid = $(this).data("queryid");
  var dataString = 'term=' + queryid;
  $.ajax({  
    type: "POST",  
    url: "/snippets",  
    data: dataString,
    success: function(data) {
      $('#query-focus').html(data);
    }
  });
});