django-autocomplete-light 2.2.0rc1 release notes

This article presents the changelog for django-autocomplete-light 2.2.0 release. To upgrade to 2.2.0rc1:

pip install -U --pre django-autocomplete-light

If you find any problem, please report it on github issues and downgrade to last stable (2.1.x series):

pip install -U django-autocomplete-light

Pending break warning, Django >= 1.9

The good old import autocomplete_light API support will be dropped with Django 1.9. All imports have moved to autocomplete_light.shortcuts and importing autocomplete_light will work until the project is used with Django 1.9.

To be forward compatible with Django >= 1.9 (current master), replace::

import autocomplete_light

With:

from autocomplete_light import shortcuts as al

This will also make your scripts a lot shorter.

CSS might break with absolutely positioning

We’ve moved back to pre-1.1.10 CSS positioning. This means appending the autocomplete box to an arbitrary DOM element (body by default) and using calculating the top and bottom attribute in javascript with yourlabs.Autocomplete.fixPosition() pretty much like Django admin’s calendar widget does. While blunt, this change should help the widget being more compatible across Django admin themes.

While this positioning system has been used since around 2005 in Django when Adrian Holovaty open sourced admin media, it has never been documented that’s it’s a good system that works well and there’s no reason to break backward compatibility in Django admin for that - note to Django admin template customizers #265.

JS Event bind change

Javascript yourlabs.Autocomplete object does not bind to the same events as it used too. Event handling has been backported from twitter typeahead and tested on firefox and android (#411).

Python Form Field validation change

The form field doesn’t call super().validate() anymore and now completely relies on AutocompleteInterface.validate_values(). This was how django-autocomplete-light was initially designed, kudos to @zhiyajun11 for pointing it out ! This optimises code which was doing validation twice and gives the flexibility it was initially designed for from within the Autocomplete class (#410).

AutocompleteModel now generates custom SQL to preserve order

AutocompleteModel.order_choices() now generate custom SQL to be enable saving the order in which users have filled an autocomplete field. This actually comes from 2.1.0, but was not PostgreSQL compatible - we’re now testing on MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite to prevent regressions. Fix contributed by @sbaum in #419.

List of changes

Most users won’t notice the break except maybe the CSS ones and of course also for Django 1.9 users.

• #419: ANSI SQL compliance (@sbaum)
• #413: Exception when using models having prima ry key names different from   id. - #412: Support models with a pk different than “id” and non-numeric.   (@mhuailin )
• #411: Android compatibility (js bind changes).
• #410: Removed double validation by not calling suport of Field.validate().
• #408: Support Django 1.8 change-link.
• #409: Compatibility with non-autocomplete inpu ts present in the widget by @SebCorbin.

Contribution changes

PIP wheel has been temporarily disabled because django-autoslug broke it, any help here is welcome, I did my best in the various fix/*wheel* branches but Travis won xD There’s a  mission to extract the JS part and package it as a standalone jQuery library to get more pull requests on the JS / CSS part. It sounds like a pretty good start in the JS / UI testing and packaging world. Any help there is welcome. CI now has tests against MySQL and PostgreSQL since we’re generating custom SQL.

Credits

Again welcome to new contributors @mhuailin and @SebCorbin and thanks all for reporting issues on GitHub with all needed details and forks which make it easy to reproduce.

And thanks to @blueyed who helped sinking this year’s backlog like crazy.