Display Posts

On both the home page (the / view) and a user’s profile page (the /profile/<username> view), a series of posts is displayed. On the home page, the five most recent posts by all users are displayed; on a user’s profile, the five most recent posts by that user are displayed. The function get_todays_recent_posts gets today’s most recent posts and the method User.get_recent_posts gets a user’s most recent posts.

def get_todays_recent_posts():
    query = """
    MATCH (user:User)-[:PUBLISHED]->(post:Post)<-[:TAGGED]-(tag:Tag)
    WHERE post.date = {today}
    RETURN user.username AS username, post, COLLECT(tag.name) AS tags
    ORDER BY post.timestamp DESC LIMIT 5
    """

    return graph.cypher.execute(query, today=date())

class User:

  ...

  def get_recent_posts(self):
    query = """
    MATCH (user:User)-[:PUBLISHED]->(post:Post)<-[:TAGGED]-(tag:Tag)
    WHERE user.username = {username}
    RETURN post, COLLECT(tag.name) AS tags
    ORDER BY post.timestamp DESC LIMIT 5
    """

    return graph.cypher.execute(query, username=self.username)

The results of Graph.cypher.execute() is a RecordList, of which each element is a Record. The elements of the Record can be accessed by attribute or key.

In the templates of index.html (shown in the previous section) and profile.html (shown in the next section), you’ll see that we include the display_posts.html template with

{% include "display_posts.html" %}

display_posts.html looks like this, and using include simply inserts this code:

<ul class="posts">
{% for row in posts %}
  <li>
    <b>{{ row.post.title }}</b>
      {% if request.path == "/" %}
    by <a href="{{ url_for('profile', username=row.username) }}">{{ row.username }}</a>
      {% endif %}
    on {{ row.post.date }}
    <a href="{{ url_for('like_post', post_id=row.post.id) }}">like</a><br>
    <i>{{ ", ".join(row.tags) }}</i><br>
    {{ row.post.text }}
{% else %}
  <li>There aren't any posts yet!
{% endfor %}
</ul>

Notice that we check that we’re on the home page with if request.path == "/". If we’re on the home page, we display the username of the user who published the post since the home page will display posts from multiple users. Otherwise, if we’re on a user’s profile page, we omit this since the profile page only displays posts for one user (the user whose profile you’re visiting).

When returning a collection in Cypher, e.g. COLLECT(DISTINCT tag.name) AS tags, it is returned as a list in Python. A minimal amount of Python code can be used within the templates; above, I use ", ".join(row.tags) to convert the list to a string where the values are separated by commas.

Finally, notice that a link titled ‘like’ is next to each post. This allows users to like a post, which is explained in the next section.

Next: Like a Post