As we all know the best code style practice to is to name Django models (classes) as singular (Cat, User, Permission, etc.), instead of plural (Cats, Users, Permissions), because it represents the structure of one record of the model. But in case of user settings it become UserSetting. Setting could be interpretted as one key-value pair but we have complete user settings record with multiple key-value pairs. So it's UserSettings.
It appearently become confusing. So what should we do in that case?
UserSetting
UserSettings
UserSettingsRecord
Other ideas?
I would simply use UserSettings, because you should name your model as a single instance of it, since a single instance contains multiple settings the plural is the correct choice (UserSetting seems to contain only a single user setting). To distinguish a single instance from multiple instances, you could append the noun instance/row/record, so with UserSettingsRecord you could make it more explicit even if I don't see it necessary (the thing is obvious and with long names you only lengthen the code).
Related
This was my original question, but it was not answered and so I thought Id post again with some of the strategies that I have tried, and be a little more specific.
I want to create a dynamic admin site, that based on if the field is blank or not will show that field. So I have a model that has a set number of fields, but for each individual entry will not contain all of the fields in my model and I want to exclude based on if that field is blank. My project is about bridges, and so to put it in practical terms I have a model that has every bridge part in it (this roughly is equivalent to 100), but each individual bridge (mapped to each unique brkey) will not have all 100 bridge parts. And so, I can prepopulate all of the fields it does have, but then the admin site has 100 other fields, and I would like to not display those fields that were not used on my admin site for that specific bridge, but those fields will differ with pretty much every bridge.
Like I said before, I have a unique bridge identifier(a unique 15 digit string), that correlates to each bridge, and then all of the various different variables that describe the bridge.
I have it set up now that the user will go to a url with the unique bridgekey and then this will create an entry of that bridge. So (as i am testing on my local machine) it would be like localhost/home/brkey and that code in my views.py that corresponds to that url is
Is this a final route that I have to take? I am very new to JavaScript and so I do not want to take this route but I will if I have to. Also does Django use Javascript in anyway that is syntactically different? If so I cannot find any Django documentation on incorporating Javascript into my admin site.
A final option that I have exhausted is to use global variables. Instead of having the url that creates the entry in my Views.py, I placed it in my admins.py, and had my modelAdmin class in there as well, so like this.
admins.py
-set up global variable
bridgekey_unique = " "
If I can find a way to either pass that unique bridge key to my modelAdmin class, or figure out if that said field is blank because the bridge doesnt have that part, I will be able to achieve what I want without using Javascript. I have tried a lot of variations of all two of theses strategies to no avail, but have not tried the JavaScript idea as I dont really know any javascript at all.
Sorry for the lengthy post, but people said I wasnt specific enough. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I didn't read all of that - sorry, there's too much. But I did notice your comment that you expect to access in your modeladmin definition a variable that you set in your view. That can't possibly work.
Anything at class level is always executed when the module containing the class is first imported. That is when the server process starts up, so there is no possible way anything done in the view can have happened yet.
You almost never want to have any logic at class level. You need to put it in methods, which are called at the relevant time. In this case, you probably need to use the get_fields method.
Edit
Looking further up at your attempt at a get_fields method, I can't see at all what you are trying to do here. 'prestressed_concrete_deck' is a literal string, and could never be None, so neither of your conditions can ever be true. And as to your question about what the parameters are, the documentation for that method explains clearly that obj is the object being edited.
I want to create a dynamic admin site, that based on if the field is blank or not will show that field. So I have a model that has a set number of fields, but for each individual entry will not contain all of the fields in my model and I want to exclude based on if that field is blank.
I have a unique bridge identifier, that correlates to each bridge, and then all of the various different variables that describe the bridge.
I have it set up now that the user will go to a url with the unique bridgekey and then this will create an entry of that bridge. So (as i am testing on my local machine) it would be like localhost/home/brkey and that code in my views.py that corresponds to that url is
However, not every bridge is the same and I have a lot more variables that I would like to include in my model but for now I am just testing on two : prestressed_concrete_deck and reinforced_concrete_coated_bars. What I want is to dynamically create the admin site to not display the prestressed_concrete_deck variable if that field is blank. So instead of displaying all of the variables on the admin site, I want to only display those variables if that bridge has that part, and to not display anything if the field is blank.
Another possible solution to the problem would be to get that unique identifier over to my admins.py. I cant figure out either how to get that individual key over as then I could query in the admins.py. If i knew how to access the bridgekey, I could just query in my admins.py dynamically. So how would I access the brkey for that entry in my admins.py (Something like BridgeModel.brkey ?)
I have tried several different things in my admin.py and have tried the comments suggestion of overwriting the get_fields() method in my admin class, but I am probably syntactically wrong and I am kind of confused what the object it takes exactly is. Is that the actual entry? Or is that the individual field?
Just override the get_fields method in your ModelAdmin class.
You can check the obj is passed as function argument so you can check which fields are empty. The function needs to return a tuple so, you would check if field1 is None and then return (field1, field2, field3) or (field2, field3) depending on the value of field1.
I was using Django 1.6 which did not support overriding the get_fields method. Updated to 1.7 and this method worked perfectly.
I'm going to ask this question in two parts: first the general question, and than the question for my specific use case.
The general question:
I'm building a podcast app, where, hopefully, we'll have users. Users have subscripitons, settings, ... , which I'd like to store on the User object, but subscriptions and settings don't belong in the same module in my code.
How do you structure your code so that all the relevant data about a user is stored together, but the code that defines and deals with specific properties can be separated?
My specific use case
I'm building the back end on Google App Engine. My user class looks something like this:
class User(ndb.Model):
username = ndb.StringProperty(required=True)
email = ndb.StringProperty(required=True)
...
Now I could just add another property for subscriptions, settings etc, but these definitions don't really belong in the users module. I've tried defining a SubscriptionsHolder and SettingsHolder class using ndb.PolyModel, but with multiple inheritance, only queries on the last superclass in the User definition supports querying.
I could just make the settings and other module query the User model directly, but this results in a circular dependency, where the User the users module depends on settings for subclassing, and settings depends on users for querying. I know I can resolve the circular dependency by moving the import statement around, but that just seems like a hack to me.
My approach was to treat User and Settings data as separate but related collections. Instead of subclassing or using PolyModel I simply introduced a way to imply a 1:1 relation between those data sets.
One way is to add a KeyProperty to Settings that links back to User. Another way is to create each Settings entity with the same id/name that is used by the related User entity. This second way allows a direct Settings.get_by_id() call once you have the User key.
I'm working on a user based, social networking type of web application in Django. It's my first one so I would like to make sure I'm using some good practices.
Currently the web app supports two kinds of users. This is represented by two different Groups. When I register a user I assign them to one of these two groups. I also have two apps, one for each type of user. The apps handle whatever things are distinct to a particular type of user. I have another app that handles the actual authentication. This app uses Django's built in User type and assigns them a UserProfile. The two different types of users have their own profiles which extend/inherit from UserProfile.
This works reasonably well, and is fairly reusable since the authentication app can pull the user type from the url and figure out which type of user to create. Since the groups are named conveniently, they can be added to the correct group too.
Is this the best way or are there more preferred, tried and true ways to handle this? It seems like a pretty common enough scenario. I don't want to continue incorrectly reinventing the wheel if I don't have to.
I was thinking of adding another app called, common, or something which would handle things that are common to all users. For example, viewing a users profile page might be something anyone who is logged in might want to do, regardless of what type of user they are.
Thanks!
Easy part first, with 2) you're spot on. That would be the simplest and most effective way of doing that. It makes sense instead of replicating functionality across both applications to have one app that handles things that are common to both user types.
Back to 1)
With both profiles extending from UserProfile, you'd run into the issue of (if you were using get_profile() on a User object - see http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#storing-additional-information-about-users) that you'd get back just a UserProfile object, not knowing which group the user actually belongs to based on the object received. This is because they both extend UserProfile but UserProfile would not be able to be (I believe) abstract, because you want every User to have a pointer to a UserProfile object which may actually be a UserGroup1 or a UserGroup2 object.
What I would suggest you do is make two seperate Models, that do not extend from the same Model (out of necessity): Group1 and Group2. You would store the information that is common to both profiles in the UserProfile of the User object. Then in the UserProfile you would have a ForeignKey to both a Group1 and a Group2 object:
group1 = models.ForeignKey(Group1, blank=True, null=True)
You would have to do the logic checking yourself, to ensure that only one is ever valid (you could just do this in an overridden save() method or something), but then to grab all of a user's data at once, and also know which group they are on you could do the following:
User.objects.filter(username='blahblah').select_related('profile', 'profile__group1', 'profile__group2')
Only one query to the database would give you all the information you'd need about a user, and you'd also know which group they are in (the one that isn't 'None').
I hope that helps.
P.S. I am assuming in this that groups don't just have unique data to each other, but also unique functionality.
I have a model containing items, which has many different fields. There is another model which assigns a set of this field to each user using a m2m-relation.
I want to achieve, that in the end, every user has access to a defined set of fields of the item model, and he only sees these field in views, he can only edit these field etc.
Is there any generic way to set this up?
One way to do this would be to break the Item model up into the parts that are individually assignable to a user. If you have fixed user types (admin, customer, team etc.) who can always see the same set of fields, these parts would be whole groups of fields. If it's very dynamic and you want to be able to set up individual fields for each user, each field is a part of its own.
That way, you would have a meta-Item which consists solely of an Id that the parts can refer to. This holds together the parts. Then, you would map a user not to the Item but to the parts and reconstruct the item view from the common Id of the parts.
A second approach would be to not include the filtering in the model layer. I. e., you leave the mapping on the model layer as it is and retrieve the full set of item fields for each user. Then you pass the items through a filter that implements the rules.
Which approach is better for you depends on how you want to filter. If it's fixed types of users, I would probably implement a rules-based post-processor, if it's very dynamic, I would suggest the approach from my earlier answer. Another reason to put the filtering rules in the model would be if you want to reuse the model in applications that couldn't reuse your filter engine (for example if you have applications in different languages sharing the same database).