Flamenco Documentation

Customizing Flamenco

You can customize the way Flamenco displays each collection. The display behaviour is defined in the Python module located at target/instances/instance/Collection.py, where target is the target directory in which you chose to install Flamenco and instance is the name of the instance. Collection.py defines a Collection class, which inherits basic display behaviour from the BaseCollection class. After making changes to Collection.py, restart the instance using flamenco restart instance to see the effect of your changes.

Text Strings

Many of the text strings in the Flamenco interface are defined as class variables on the Collection class, and you can assign them other values in Collection.py. For a complete list, see target/python/BaseCollection.py. The strings you will most likely want to change are:

PAGE_TITLE = the title of the page (shown in the window title bar)
PAGE_HEADING = the main heading at the top of the page
PAGE_SUBHEADING = the subheading at the top of the page

Adjusting Layout

The layout of pages is also determined in part by class variables on the Collection class. Some parameters you may want to adjust are:

ITEMS_PER_GROUP = number of items to show in each group in a grouped result listing
ITEMS_PER_ROW = number of items to show on each row in a result listing
ITEMS_PER_HISTORY_ROW = number of items to show on each row in a history view
ITEMS_PER_GROUPED_PAGE = maximum number of items to show on one page of grouped results
ITEMS_PER_UNGROUPED_PAGE = maximum number of items to show on one page of ungrouped results

Displaying Items

Flamenco needs to be told how you want to display your items. When you create a new Flamenco instance, a default Collection.py file is installed. The default Collection class displays items by showing just the value of the first attribute. You will probably want to customize how Flamenco displays your items to show more information and format it in a more useful way. The display of items is defined by two methods in the Collection class, which you can edit: itemdisplay and itemlisting.

itemdisplay is used to display a single item on its own page. Its arguments are item, the identifier of the single item being shown, and and request, a WebKit HTTPResponse object that you can use to obtain information about the client. The request information could be used, for example, to restrict access to certain metadata to clients with certain IP addresses.

itemlisting is used to display an item in a result listing. Its arguments are item, the identifier of the item, index, the index (starting from zero) of the item in the result set, link, a function you can use to link to a single-item page, and query, the query that produced the result set.

Your best bet for customizing item display is to start with the Collection.py file that has already been placed in your instance directory and edit it.