Implement metadata only parsing for Items

[campb303]

Currently, when an Item is loaded, all of its contents including its body are parsed. As more features such as attachment parsing are added, this could slow down the loading of the ItemTable in the UI by:

• Parsing unnecessary information like body sections and attachment contents
• Transferring whole items with body and attachments when only metadata is needed

This could be addressed by implementing a function that only loads information needed to display in the ItemTable and waiting to load the rest of the item until it is requested in the ItemView.

[campb303]

With multiple queue loading allowed now, this issue is more important as load times now exceed 10 seconds.

[campb303]

Also, Sundeep wants a Jester loader.

[campb303]

This is waiting for a code review.

[benne238]

Header Only Parsing

In pull request #113, this issue was addressed by modifying the arguments for Item.
The arguments for Item are now 'queue', 'item_number', and 'get_full_item'.

Argument	Description
queue	The queue the item is located in
number	The item number of the item
wholeItem	A boolean representing if the full item should be returned True: Return full item False: Return only the headers for the item

This was done by modifying which attributes of the Item class in ECNQueue are defined based on the value of wholeItem:

def __init__(self, queue: str, number: int, wholeItem: bool) -> None:

      # Code was intentionally omitted here for relevancy

      if wholeItem: self.content = self.__parseSections()

The entirety of the item content, which is stored in self.content is only returned if the wholeItem variable is True. The wholeItem variable is only True when a specific item is requested, such as Me 11, otherwise it is False, such as when an entire queue (or multiple queues) are selected, such as Me, Ce, and Cgt without a specific item reference.

[campb303]

This functionality has been modified and extended.

ECNQueue Module

Both Items and Queues has an argument in their constructor called headersOnly that indicates whether or not to parse the contents of an item. For Items this will default to False, loading the content, for Queues this will default to True, not loading the content for a Queue's items.

Examples:

import ECNQueue

# Create an Item with content
item = Item("ce", 100)
# Create an Item without content
item = Item("ce", 100, headersOnly=True)

# Create a Queue with content
queue = Queue("ce", headersOnly=False)
# Create a Queue without content
queue = Queue("ce")

API

In the API, the Item and Queue constructors are used with the same defaults and customization options. A client can control this option using a URL's query string.

Examples:

# Request an Item with content
curl 'localhsot:5000/ce/100'
# Request an Item without content
curl 'localhsot:5000/ce/100?headersOnly=True'

This is parsed in the API using the args property of Flask's request object. This works with Flask RESTful's resource because a Flask RESTful Resource class extends the Flask request class. Because the query string is passed as a string, we can use a string comparison to parse a boolean value and pass that value to an Item and Queue constructor.

Examples:

from flask import Flask, request
from flask_restful import Api, Resource
import ECNQueue

# Create Flask App
app = Flask(__name__)

# Create API Interface
api = Api(app)

# Create a Flask RESTful Resource for dealing with Items
class Item(Resource):
    # Create a method to handle HTTP GET requests
    def get(self, queue: str, number: int) -> str:
        # Parse a boolean value from the query string using Flask's request object
        headersOnly = True if request.args.get("headersOnly") == "True" else False
        return ECNQueue.Item(queue, number, headersOnly=headersOnly).toJson()

# Add the Item resource to routing
api.add_resource(Item, "/api/<string:queue>/<int:number>")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run()

[campb303]

Next steps are to merge this into staging and update the frontend' logic. This should happen after #123