How to add fields to third party app model? - django

I'm working on a web page which uses Django-quiz app. When you install the django-quiz, you can create quizes, questions etc. in Admin.
Unfortunately, there is no way, how to assign Quiz to my model Language so I'm looking for a way, how to add field Language into the model Quiz.
I've tried this but it does not work. I've tried already to create a proxy model with additional field but I realised that it is not possible in proxy models.
from quiz.models import Sitting,Quiz
class QuizAddLanguage(models.Model):
quiz = models.OneToOneField(Quiz)
language = models.ForeignKey(Language)
Do you know what to do to add field to third party app model?

For this time, OneToOne should be enough - for each language there will be one quiz
Since its one to one then you can just define the relationship on your own language class, django by default, will provide you the reverse lookup meaning
language_obj.quiz
quiz_obj.language
will both be valid.

Here is a relevant Django ticket, which was closed with a resolution of "wontfix" six years ago:
https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/14969
I think this comment provides some good information:
Comments gives you the *right* way to handle this problem -- you define an interface, and make the model itself pluggable. Not all Django's contrib apps follow this approach, but that doesn't mean we bake monkeypatching into the core -- we fix the contrib apps.
django.contrib.comments is now a standalone app, but it still makes itself relatively easy to customize. Here is the relevant documentation:
https://django-contrib-comments.readthedocs.io/en/latest/custom.html
If a third party app doesn't make itself easy to customize, I would suggest asking the developer to update it and point them to the above links for examples on how to go about doing it.

Related

Django User Class Inheritance

Apologies for this question but I wasn't sure how to get assistance. I'm slowly learning Django (around 2 months in) and trying to work out how to enable user authentication into my website. I've been reading about 3 different ways to do this; OneToOne link to the User class, Subclass the User class or changing the AUTH_USER_MODEL (although not following that one at the momement).
I'm getting myself confused which way to go and would like advice. I'm looking at either OneToOne or creating my own based on the User class. Are there any advantages to one way or the other before I decide which way to go ?
Thanks in advance, there is no where else I can turn.
Regards
Wayne
The answer is, as it often is with vague questions, it completely depends.
Out of the box, you can use the built in auth models to allow users basic access to your sites... that's kind of the whole point of the auth package. If that's all you're looking to do just leverage Auth.User
The question really becomes, what do you need that the built in auth model is not providing you? When you can answer that question, you'll have a better idea of whether you need to override with a custom auth class, simply extend a user profile, or foreign key into other custom data models.

Django app where you can send application to authorities

I am currently working to write a web app where people fill out the necessary information, and apply to their mentors.
So, at this point, mentors have a model class that is pretty much like the applicant's, so that they can correct the applicant's info without affecting the applicant's original profile.
I will appreciate any helpful comments. Specifically, I am looking for:
-A similar per-exisiting django app that does more or less so I can browse the source.
-Any special Django feature that allows this that I can not aware of.
-General info on how things like these are done in general.
Thank you.
Ad general info)
You would benefit from doing this in a single model (say ApplicationModel), with fields in pairs - field_name_applicant, field_name_mentor.
Then use a CreateView with its fields property set to only the *_applicant fields for the applicant to fill in the applications initially, and an UpdateView with its fields set to the *_mentor fields for the mentor to correct the applicant fields.
Have ApplicationModel.clean() copy all *_applicant field values to their *_mentor counterpart if the later is not set.
Now you have all your business logic in the model where it belongs; quoting a headline in the introduction of Two Scoops of Django:
Fat Models, Helper Modules, Thin Views, Stupid Templates

Django design patterns for overriding models

I'm working on an e-commerce framework for Django. The chief design goal is to provide the bare minimum functionality in terms of models and view, instead allowing the users of the library to extend or replace the components with their own.
The reasoning for this is that trying to develop a one-size-fits-all solution to e-commerce leads to overcomplicated code which is often far from optimal.
One approach to tackling this seems to be using inversion-of-control, either through Django's settings file or import hacks, but I've come up against a bit of a problem due to how Django registers its models.
The e-commerce framework provides a bunch of abstract models, as well as concrete versions in {app_label}/models.py. Views make use of Django's get_model(app_label,model) function to return the model class without having to hard-code the reference.
This approach has some problems:
Users have to mimic the structure of the framework's apps, ie the app_label and effectively replace our version of the app with their own
Because of the way the admin site works by looking for admin.py in each installed app, they have to mimic or explicitly import the framework's admin classes in order to use them. But by importing them, the register method gets called so they have to be unregistered if a user wants to customise them.
The user has to be extremely careful about how they import concrete models from the core framework. This is because Django's base model metaclass automatically registers a model with the app cache as soon as the class definition is read (ie upon __new__), and the first model registered with a specific label is the one you're stuck with. So you have to define all your override models BEFORE you import any of the core models. This means you end up with messy situations of having a bunch of imports at the bottom of your modules rather than the top.
My thinking is to go further down the inversion-of-control rabbit hole:
All references to core components (models, views, admin, etc) replaced with calls to an IoC container
For all the core (e-commerce framework) models, replace the use of Django's base model metaclass with one that doesn't automatically register the models, then have the container explicitly register them on startup.
My question:
Is there a better way to solve this problem? The goal is to make it easy to customise the framework and override functionality without having to learn lots of annoying tricks. The key seems to be with models and the admin site.
I appreciate that using an IoC container isn't a common pattern in the Django world, so I want to avoid it if possible, but it is seeming like the right solution.
Did you look at the code from other projects with a similar approach?
Not sure if this way covers your needs, but imo the code of django-shop is worth to look at.
This framework provides the basic logic, allowing you to provide custom logic where needed.
customize via models
eg see the productmodel.py
#==============================================================================
# Extensibility
#==============================================================================
PRODUCT_MODEL = getattr(settings, 'SHOP_PRODUCT_MODEL',
'shop.models.defaults.product.Product')
Product = load_class(PRODUCT_MODEL, 'SHOP_PRODUCT_MODEL')
customize via logic/urls
eg see the shop's simplevariation-plugin
It extends the cart-logic, so it hooks in via urlpattern:
(r'^shop/cart/', include(simplevariations_urls)),
(r'^shop/', include(shop_urls)),
and extends the views:
...
from shop.views.cart import CartDetails
class SimplevariationCartDetails(CartDetails):
"""Cart view that answers GET and POSTS request."""
...
The framework provides several points to hook-in, the simplevariation-plugin mentionned above additionally provides a cart-modifier:
SHOP_CART_MODIFIERS = [
...
'shop_simplevariations.cart_modifier.ProductOptionsModifier',
...
]
I worry that this explanation is not very understandable, it is difficult to briefly summarize this concept. But take a look at the django-shop project and some of its extensions: ecosystem

Avoiding circular dependencies in Django applications

While working on my Django-based projects I'm always trying to follow Django's approach to reusable apps - I'm trying to decouple my applications from each other and especially trying to avoid cross references but sometimes it does not seem to be possible.
Let's consider a simple example with 2 applications: articles and users. Articles application defines article model, articles list view and single article view, users application defines user model and user profile view. Article is referencing user from the author field, so articles application is obviously dependent on users application which is fine.
But when it comes to user profile, I want to display latest articles authored by the user (and may be latest articles viewed by the user) on that page but that makes users application aware of articles application which is what I'm trying to avoid.
I can obviously try to push all such references to the template level but it still does not solve the issue completely and at the same time may be very inefficient in terms of database queries sometimes.
What do you guys do in such cases?
If you are really set on not having any conversation between the 'user' app and the 'article' app, then you need a third app to act as interface. That would know about users and articles and define all the coupling between them. Your article view would be in there, since it has to get the user data, and your user profile view would be in there, because it needs to say "Fred wrote 5 articles".
Whether this level of decoupling is worth it, I don't know. Sometimes programming for re-usability gets in the way of making the thing usable in the first place.
The standard (or preferred) way of keeping coupled apps decoupled is to add a conditional coupling - like in some apps that try to import django-notification and only if they find it, they report events to it.
Still, if you have two apps that talks to each other by design, then I don't see any point in decoupling them - there are plenty of examples in Django world of apps that just require other apps. Note that I'm talking here about writing real-world software, not about some academic delibrations :-)
It seems that in this case, the dependency of users on articles is in a method, not a field. (Whether it's a model method, a model class method, or a manager method is immaterial). If that's so, you can do a lazy import of articles inside the method. By the time this import is performed, users.models will be fully loaded, so even if this is a circular import, it will not cause problems. The "import users" statement in articles will not have to re-load users and will have the full users namespace available.

How do you make a Django app pluggable?

Say for example I have a Blog app that I want to be able to drop into different projects, but I always want the Blog to be associated with some other model. For example, in one case I may want it to be associated with a user:
site.com/someuser/blog
But on another site I want it to be associated with, say, a school:
site.com/someschool/blog
Is there a way to make the Blog app pluggable so that it's not necessary to redefine the model (adding a foreign key field) whenever I drop it into a project?
There are several important details for making sure an app can be reusable and I think it's best to link to two of the more important sets of documentation on the topic:
django-best-practices
django-reusable-apps-docs
You might want to look into the ContentTypes framework, I used it to create a comment app that can be used for commenting any model in the database (for different reasons, I didn't want to use the standard django comment app).
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/contenttypes/
Generic relationships allow you to have a foreign key to any other model. However it's not clear from your question what type of object you want a foreign key to link to. I suspect that foreign key relationship isn't really generic - you just haven't spotted another part of your system that could also be a reusable app.