Django session strange behavior - django

Currently using django 1.7.
I'm using a file based session storage and have request.session.modified set to True. In a simple DB record creation, i store the row id in the session like so:
request.session['rid'] = xyz
request.session.modified = True
I checked if the value is really in the session and it is. In another request (same session though), I tried to read the 'rid' value but the 'rid' does not reflect the newer value i just created instead it shows the older value.
The browser is kept open and record creation is a constant process.
I also checked the session_key and its the same in both cases. I'm not creating any new session vars apart from this value (or modifying it). I switched to file based session storage because DB session had the same issue.
I'm at loss as to how this is happening. Can somebody help?
TIA

Related

How to handle network errors when saving to Django Models

I have a Django .save() execution that loops at n times.
My concern is how to guard against network errors during saving, as some entries could be saved while others won't and there could be no telling.
What is the best way to make sure that the execution is completed?
Here's a sample of my code
# SAVE DEBIT ENTRIES
for i in range(len(debit_journals)):
# UPDATE JOURNAL RECORD
debit_journals[i].approval_no = journal_transaction_id
debit_journals[i].approval_status = 'approved'
debit_journals[i].save()
Either use bulk_create / bulk_update to execute a single DB query, or use transaction.atomic as decorator for your function so that any error on save will rollback your database before your function was run.
Try something like below (I suppose your model name is DebitJournal and debit_journals is a list).
for debit_journal in debit_journals:
debit_journal.approval_no = journal_transaction_id
debit_journal.approval_status = 'approved'
DebitJournal.objects.bulk_update(debit_journals, ["approval_no", "approval_status"])
If debit_journals is a QuerySet you can also try
debit_journals.update(approval_no=journal_transaction_id, approval_status='approved').
It depends of what you call a network error, if it's between the user and the django application or between the django application and the database. If it's only between the user and the app, note that if the request has been sent correctly even if the user lose the connection afterward the objects will be created. So a user might not have the request response, but objects will still be created.
If it's between the database and the django application some objects might still be created before the error.
Usually if you want a "All or Nothing" behaviour you should use manual transaction as described there: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/topics/db/transactions/
Note that if the creation is really long you might hit the request timeout. If the creation takes more than a few seconds you should consider making it a background task. The request is only there to create the task.
See Python task queue alternatives and frameworks for 3rd party solutions.

Connection issues implementing Django Custom Storage backend with Box Cloud Storage API

I am working on a legacy Django application that has a lot of third party dependencies, one of which is the storage backend for file uploads. I was recently tasked with replacing our legacy third party cloud storage vendor with a newer cloud storage vendor (Box).
The cloud storage is implemented as a custom storage backend and used as the "storage" parameter in FileFields in models throughout the app. I'm basically trying to figure out what exactly happens in storage if you have a FileField in a model and you create a ModelForm based on that model, then you call "save" on the form.
It seems that a lot of stuff is going on and some of it is causing connection problems with the cloud storage API.
I tried reading the Django source to follow it and got all the way down to where the model is deciding if it should do an update (by doing an "exists" check in storage) or an insert.
Once it decides to do an insert, I noticed a call to my cloud storage backend occurs to upload the file (presumably non blocking?) as the insert sql is being generated.
Somewhere in here, connections to the cloud storage begin to hang and become unresponsive. At least, all I see in logs is
INFO requests.packages.urllib3.connectionpool - Starting new HTTPS connection (1): upload.box.com"
and no further info or response.
Unlike the previous cloud storage, the new one issues JWT's per session instead of having a static auth token that you simply pass every time. If I do not use Django's ModelForm with its magical "save" method, but call methods directly on the models with the FileFields, I do not encounter the connection problem - I get responses just fine from the cloud storage API.
So, I'm thinking there must be some kind of concurrency issue when calling "save" on a form that affects a model with a FileField?? I'm a little stumped. The code is involved, so it is hard to copy here, but basically it comes down to:
class CustomStorage:
def __init__(self):
set up storage API client,
authenticate client instance, etc
def _save(self, name):
call storage API methods to upload file
** includes a retry loop with file renaming
algorithm to avoid name conflicts, as
cloud API does not allow duplicate file
names
def exists(self, name):
call storage API methods to determine if file name conflict exists
def _open(self, name):
call storage API methods to download file
custom_storage = CustomStorage()
class ExampleModel(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(maxlength=255)
file_ref = FPFileField(upload_to="uploads", storage=custom_storage) #because we also have a dependency on FilePicker, now called FileStack
class ExampleModelForm(ModelForm):
file_ref = CustomFilePickerField()
class Meta:
model = ExampleModel
fields = ('name', 'file_obj')
form = ExampleModelForm()
model = form.save() # --> connection problem with
# cloud storage API starts here
# if I were to call ExampleModel.objects.create(...),
# the storage upload process would work fine
Is there some gotcha I'm not aware of that Django experts would know about implementing custom storage backends for Django based on cloud storage APIs?
Turns out that the problem was our usage of a deprecated version of a FilePicker field for the uploaded document model field, combined with an old bug in a stale version of Requests. Occasionally, this field would return a Django file instance wrapped around a cStringIO.StringIO object instead of a vanilla file object. This ended up running into a bug in the Requests library which caused stalled responses when chunking for a multi-part POST when the payload is a StringIO instance. Because upgrading is not an option, I solved the issue by detecting if the the underlying Django FileField File is not a file object and re-wrapping it in a ContentFile instance and seek-ing to 0, in order to play nice with the older version of Requests. If anyone knows of a better alternative, by all means, please let me know.

How to persist a query between flask page requests?

I need to run the same exact query on multiple page requests.
The first page renders the items, the second page exports the items to excel.
Storing the query directly on session fails because BaseQuery is not JSON serializable:
session['previous_query'] = SomeModel.query
The next option is to store the query as a string:
session['previous_query'] = str(SomeModel.query)
This works but I would now need to run session.execute:
db.session.execute(session['previous_query'])
And that does not give me ORM objects but plain dicts without relationships.
Finally I can store only the ids, but that would require me to run the query on both ends multiple times and would not preserve the ordering I need.
Any suggestions?
You can serialize the query with the SQLAlchemy Serializer extention:
from sqlalchemy.ext import serializer
session['previous_query'] = serializer.dumps(SomeModel.query, -1)
then reconstitute the query with:
query = serializer.loads(session['previous_query'], db.metadata, db.session)
objects = query.all()
where db is your Flask-SQLAlchemy integration object.
Under the hood this uses the pickle module but pickling has been customized to be more compact and to omit the session and engine references; these are loaded again when loading the serialized data with serializer.loads().
For this to work on Python 2 you do need to set the protocol version (second argument to serializer.dumps()) as the seralization won't work with the default protocol version 0. Pick version 1 or 2 instead, or use -1 to pick the highest version supported by your Python installation.
Because this uses pickle, do be careful with loading the pickle from untrusted sources; a Flask session is tamper proof because it is cryptographically signed, but if an attacker ever was able to obtain your server-side secret then the attacker can take over your process by sending you a carefully crafted pickle for serializer.loads() to load.

Multi-tenant Django applications using Mongoengine

I want to build a multi tenant architecture for a SAAS system. We are using Django as our backend and mongoengine as our main database and gunicorn as our web-server.
Our clients are a few big companies, so the number of databases pre-allocating space shouldn't be a problem.
The first approach we took was to write a middleware to determine the source of the request to properly connect to a mongoengine database. Here is the code:
class MongoConnectionMiddleware(object):
def process_request(self, request):
if request.user.is_authenticated():
mongo_connect(request.user.profile.establishment)
And the mongo_connect method:
def mongo_connect(establishment):
db_name = 'db_client_%d' % establishment.id
connect(db_name)
This will register the "default" alias as the db_name for every mongoengine request.
But it seems that when many concurrent users from different companies are making requests, each one sets the default db_name to it's own name.
As an example:
Company A makes a request and connects to database A. While A is making it's work company B connects to database B. This makes A also connect to B's database in the process, so A fails to find some ids.
¿Is there a way to isolate the connection to the mongo database per request to avoid this problem?
Unfortunately MongoEngine seems to be designed around a very basic use case of a single primary connection and multiple auxiliary connections.
http://docs.mongoengine.org/en/latest/guide/connecting.html#connecting-to-mongodb
To get around the default connection logic, I define the first connection I come across as the default, I also add it as a named connection. I then add any subsequent connection as named connections only.
https://github.com/MongoEngine/mongoengine/issues/607#issuecomment-38651532
You can use the with_db decorator to switch from one connection to another, but it's a contextmanager call, which means as soon as you leave the with statement, it will revert. It also still requires a default connection.
http://docs.mongoengine.org/en/latest/guide/connecting.html#switch-database-context-manager
You might be able to put it inside a function and then yield inside the with to prevent it reverting immediately, I'm not sure if this is valid.
You could use a wrapper of some kind, either a function, class or a custom QuerySet, that checks the current django/flask session and switches the db to the appropriate connection.
I'm not sure if a QuerySet can do this, but it would probably be the nicest way if it can.
http://docs.mongoengine.org/en/latest/guide/querying.html#custom-querysets
I included some code in this issue here where I change the database connection for my models.
https://github.com/MongoEngine/mongoengine/issues/605
def switch(model, db):
model._meta['db_alias'] = db
# must set _collection to none so it is re-evaluated
model._collection = None
return model
MyDocument = switch(MyDocument, 'db-alias')
You'll also want to take a look at the code that mongoengine uses to switch dbs.
Beware that mongo engine likes to cache things, so changing a few variables here and there doesn't always cause an effect. It's full of surprises like this.
Edit:
I should also add, that the 'connect' call won't pick up value changes. So calling connect with new parameters wont take effect unless its a new alias. Even the disconnect function (which isn't exposed publically) doesn't let you do this as the models will cache the connection. I mention this in some of the issues linked above and also here: https://github.com/MongoEngine/mongoengine/issues/566

Updating a hit counter when an image is accessed in Django

I am working on doing some simple analytics on a Django webstite (v1.4.1). Seeing as this data will be gathered on pretty much every server request, I figured the right way to do this would be with a piece of custom middleware.
One important metric for the site is how often given images are accessed. Since each image is its own object, I thought about using django-hitcount, but figured that was unnecessary for what I was trying to do. If it proves easier, I may use it though.
The current conundrum I face is that I don't want to query the database and look for a given object for every HttpRequest that occurs. Instead, I would like to wait until a successful response (indicated by an HttpResponse.status of 200 or whatever), and then query the server and update a hit field for the corresponding image. The reason the only way to access the path of the image is in process_request, while the only way to access the status code is in process_response.
So, what do I do? Is it as simple as creating a class variable that can hold the path and then lookup the file once the response code of 200 is returned, or should I just use django-hitcount?
Thanks for your help
Set up a cron task to parse your Apache/Nginx/whatever access logs on a regular basis, perhaps with something like pylogsparser.
You could use memcache to store the counters and then periodically persist them to the database. There are risks that memcache will evict the value before it's been persisted but this could be acceptable to you.
This article provides more information and highlights a risk arising when using hosted memcache with keys distributed over multiple servers. http://bjk5.com/post/36567537399/dangers-of-using-memcache-counters-for-a-b-tests