There are only a few shopping days left until Christmas!

If your friends and family haven’t already bought you everything you’ve always wanted, they might need some digital assistance.

Enter Christmalist! The sofware-as-a-service solution for your yuletide purchasing needs.

https://christmalist.anvil.app

It’s a wishlist, stored online, that you can share with your friends. Your friends can check off what they’ve bought to avoid double-buying.

Building a list

Here’s my wishlist:

This is a simple CRUD app - the “wish” button adds my items to a Data Table, with the ‘Owner’ column set to the Users row for whoever is logged in.

You’ve got to be logged in to make a list, so the first time the “wish” button is pressed, I display a login form using:

    anvil.users.login_with_form()

Sharing with friends

To share your list with a friend, you simply enter their email address:

The email is sent using anvil.email.send:

    anvil.email.send(
      to=email,
      subject=f"{user['email']} wants to share their wishlist with you on Christmalist!",
      text=f"""
        {user['email']} wants to share their wishlist with you on Christmalist!
       
        Follow this link to see it: https://christmalist.anvil.app/#?u={user['email']&k={key}}
      """,
      html=f"""
        <h1 style="color: #D32F2F">View your friend's wish list!</h1>
      
        {user['email']} wants to share their wishlist with you on Christmalist!<br><br>
       
        <a href="https://christmalist.anvil.app/#?u={user['email']}&k={key}">Click here</a> to see it!
      """,
    )

This email contains a link to Christmalist, with some query parameters that dictate whose list is being shared, and a random key to make sure people don’t randomly invent these links for themselves. Here’s an example:

https://christmalist.anvil.app/#?u=shaun@anvil.works&k=9de2e62f-ba19-4d21-8041-956cbf1da61f

The ‘Users’ table stores a list of valid keys. I check the k query param against the sharing_keys column to check that the link is valid.

Viewing your friends’ lists

Finally, you can view your friends’ lists by selecting them from a dropdown. If you’ve purchased that item for them, you can check the box so nobody else buys the same thing!

Go ahead and use it

The app is published at christmalist.anvil.app - go ahead and use it to streamline your present-receiving this year!

You can get the source code for yourself – you could even make a business out of it, using Anvil’s Stripe integration to take payments!

To get started, get your own copy of the source code, and tweak it however you like: