The existing code was really difficult to reason about:
- The default notetype depended on the selected deck, and vice versa,
and this logic was buried in the deck and notetype choosing screens,
and models.py.
- Changes to the notetype were not passed back directly, but were fired
via a hook, which changed any screen in the app that had a notetype
selector.
It also wasn't great for performance, as the most recent deck and tags
were embedded in the notetype, which can be expensive to save and sync
for large notetypes.
To address these points:
- The current deck for a notetype, and notetype for a deck, are now
stored in separate config variables, instead of directly in the deck
or notetype. These are cheap to read and write, and we'll be able to
sync them individually in the future once config syncing is updated in
the future. I seem to recall some users not wanting the tag saving
behaviour, so I've dropped that for now, but if people end up missing
it, it would be simple to add as an extra auxiliary config variable.
- The logic for getting the starting deck and notetype has been moved
into the backend. It should be the same as the older Python code, with
one exception: when "change deck depending on notetype" is enabled in
the preferences, it will start with the current notetype ("curModel"),
instead of first trying to get a deck-specific notetype.
- ModelChooser has been duplicated into notetypechooser.py, and it
has been updated to solely be concerned with keeping track of a selected
notetype - it no longer alters global state.
- anki._backend stores the protobuf files and rsbackend.py code
- pylib modules import protobuf messages directly from the
_pb2 files, and explicitly export any will be returned or consumed
by public pylib functions, so that calling code can import from pylib
- the "rsbackend" no longer imports and re-exports protobuf messages
- pylib can just consume them directly.
- move errors to errors.py
Still todo:
- rsbridge
- finishing the work on rsbackend, and check what we need to add
back to the original file location to avoid breaking add-ons
- notetypes are fetched from the DB as needed, and cached in Python
- handle note type changes in the backend. Multiple operations can now
be performed in one go, but this is not currently exposed in the GUI.
- extra methods to grab sorted note type names quickly, and fetch by
name
- col.models.save() without a provided notetype is now a no-op
- note loading/saving handled in the backend
- notes with no valid cards can now be added
- templates can now be deleted even if they would previously
orphan notes
a number of fixmes have been left in notes.py and models.py
- all .ftl files for a language are concatenated into a single file
at build time
- all languages are included in the binary
- external ftl files placed in the ftl folder can override the
built-in definitions
- constants are automatically generated for each string key
- dropped the separate StringsGroup enum
The parsing step is considerably slower in Python, but if parsing
is moved out of the test function, Python wins at 45ms to Rust's 67ms
on 10,000 rounds, presumably due to the overhead of serializing to
Protobuf. Not enough of a difference to justify the inclusion of extra
dependencies and duplicating the lookup code in any case.
We can now show replay buttons for the audio contained in {{FrontSide}}
without having to play it again when the answer is shown.
The template code now always defers FrontSide rendering, as it wasn't
a big saving, and meant the logic had to be implemented twice.