Message Adding Menu

In this session, I added the menu for adding messages. This went surprisingly smoothly; I had to learn how to use the Select widget, but most of the other parts of the UI I had already used, or could piece together from other menus. The biggest UI section, the data and time editing, can simply be pulled from the group editing menus. Overall, this session went smoothly, and I was able to focus on how to do make person selection work.

Part 1: Person Selection

Each message obviously needs a person who sent it; for this I use a Select widget, which is essentially a drop down menu. After my previous problems with passing the wrong type into a field, I wasn’t exactly sure how to make the selection box work; I really wanted to pass Person objects in, as it would remove needing to use a person’s name as a key to try to find the right Person object afterwords. I tried it and… it totally worked. After overriding the str method to return the person’s name and email, the Select widget was functional. Sometimes it is nice when code just works.