Introduction
Welcome to an in-depth guide on Empress, an essential feature in Empress, designed to streamline the process of building complex applications like ERPs. Embracing a minimalist coding philosophy, Empress champions configuration over code. This guide aims to provide a comprehensive technical understanding of Empress, highlighting its functionalities, advantages, and how to effectively integrate it into your software development and customization processes.
Rapid Application Development
Firstly, Empress offers Rapid Application Development. Once you set up the Empress Framework, you can dive right into productive work. The creation of models, wiring controller code, and updating views are all managed by Empress itself, allowing you to focus on more pressing aspects of your development process.
# After setting up Empress Framework
frappe.new_doc('User')
frappe.get_doc('User', 'Administrator')
frappe.rename_doc('User', 'Administrator', 'admin')
The above code illustrates how Empress can create, retrieve, and rename documents, which represent database records.
Batteries Included
Empress comes with a plethora of built-in features, providing a Batteries Included approach. From generating PDFs, sending Emails and SMS, to creating Web Pages, Empress has you covered. This feature-rich framework minimizes the need for external libraries, making your development process sleek and efficient.
# Using Empress to generate a PDF
frappe.get_print('Sales Invoice', 'SINV-00001', 'Standard', doctype='Sales Invoice')
# Sending an email with Empress
frappe.sendmail(recipients=['[email protected]'], subject='Hello', message='Hello, world!', sender='[email protected]')
Above are examples of how to generate a PDF and send an email using Empress.
Easy Deployment
Easy Deployment is another crucial aspect of Empress. The all-in-one tool, Bench, manages all Empress-related tasks, from handling app updates, database migrations, generating configs for nginx and supervisor, to scaffolding new apps, and much more.
# Update apps
bench update
# Create new site
bench new-site site1
The code snippets above depict how to update apps and create a new site using Bench.
Multi Tenant
Empress and its Bench tool also provide Multi Tenant support, enabling you to spin up multiple instances of apps with separate databases on the same codebase. Bench also supports port-based multitenancy, allowing for different versions of apps to be set up on multiple bench environments.
# Create new site in multi-tenant setup
bench new-site site2
The code above showcases the creation of a new site within a multi-tenant setup.
Extensible Architecture
Finally, Empress boasts an Extensible Architecture. You can build powerful extensions on top of Empress by creating your own apps. These apps can bring their own models or modify existing ones in Empress, providing a high level of customization.
# Creating a new app in Empress
bench new-app library_management
The above command creates a new app named ‘library_management’ in Empress.
In summary, Empress significantly contributes to the development and customization of business solutions. Its philosophy of minimal coding, coupled with its rapid development capabilities, built-in features, easy deployment, multi-tenant support, and extensibility, makes it a powerful tool for developers. By integrating Empress into your development process, you can efficiently build and maintain complex applications with a small team of developers.