Can I Use Python to Make a Delete Button in a 'web page'

Question

I have written a script that goes through a bunch of files and snips out a portion of the files for further processing. The script creates a new directory and creates new files for each snip that is taken out. I have to now evaluate each of the files that were created to see if it is what I needed. The script also creates an html index file with links to each of the snips. So I can click the hyperlink to see the file, make a note in a spreadsheet to indicate if the file is correct or not and then use the back button in the browser to take me back to the index list.

I was sitting here wondering if I could somehow create a delete button in the browser next to the hyperlink. My thought is I would click the hyperlink, make a judgment about the file and if it is not one I want to keep then when I get back to the main page I just press the delete button and it is gone from the directory.

Does anyone have any idea if this is possible. I am writing this in python but clearly the issue is is there a way to create an htm file with a delete button-I would just use Python to write the commands for the deletion button.

Answer 1

You would have to write the web page in Python. There are many Python web frameworks out there (e.g. Django) that are easy to work with. You could convert your entire scripting framework to a web application that has a worker thread going and crawling through html pages, saving them to a particular location, indexing them for you to see and providing a delete button that calls the system's delete function on the particular file.

Answer 2

Rather than having your script output static HTML files, with a little amount of work you could probably adapt your script to run as a small web application with the help of something like web.py.

You would start your script and point a browser at http://localhost:8080, for instance. The web browser would be your user interface.

To achieve the 'delete' functionality, all you need to do is write some Python that gets executed when a form is submitted to actually perform the deletion.

Answer 3

You could make this even simpler by making it all happen in one main page. Instead of having a list of hyperlinks, just have the main page have one frame that loads one of the autocreated pages in it. Put a couple of buttons at the bottom - a "Keep this page" and a "Delete this page." When you click either button, the main page refreshes, this time with the next autocreated page in the frame.

You could make this as a cgi script in your favorite scripting language. You can't just do this in html because an html page only does stuff client-side, and you can only delete files server-side. You will probably need as cgi args the page to show in the frame, and the last page you viewed if the button click was a "delete".

Answer 4

Well I finally found an answer that achieved what I wanted-I did not want to learn a new language-Python is hard enough given my lack or experience

def OnDelete(self, event):
    assert self.current, "invalid delete operation"
    try:
        os.remove(os.path.join(self.cwd, self.current))