Back
Sep 23, 2010

Dynamic class generation, QuerySetManager and use_for_related_fields

It appears that not everyone knows that in python you can create classes dynamically without metaclasses. I'll show an example of how to do it.

So we've learned how to use custom QuerySet to chain requests:

Article.objects.old().public()

Now we need to make it work for related objects:

user.articles.old().public()

This is done using use_for_related_fields, but it needs a little trick. Thing is that in django related managers are initialized without arguments, and our QuerySetManager takes argument - queryset class.

objects = QuerySetManager(MyQuerySet)

We have to update QuerySetManager in such a way, that will allow setting queryset as class field:

class QuerySetManager(models.Manager):
    use_for_related_fields = True
    queryset_class = QuerySet

    def get_query_set(self):
        return self.queryset_class(self.model, using=self._db)

    def __getattr__(self, key):
        return getattr(self.get_query_set(), key)

In order to use this manager, we have to create a sublcass and set queryset_class:

class MyManager(QuerySetManager):
    queryset_class = MyQuerySet

It's not fun to create such class every time. So we'll write a function that does it for us:

def queryset_manager(qs_class):
    class Manager(QuerySetManager):
        queryset_class = qs_class
    return Manager()

Now it's enough to write:

objects = queryset_manager(MyQuerySet)

Subscribe for the news and updates

More thoughts
May 22, 2017Technology
Web Application Security: 10 Best Practices

Protection of WEB App is of paramount importance and it should be afforded the same level of security as the intellectual rights or private property. I'm going to cover how to protect your web app.

Dec 1, 2016Technology
How to Use Django & PostgreSQL for Full Text Search

For any project there may be a need to use a database full-text search. We expect high speed and relevant results from this search. When we face such problem, we usually think about Solr, ElasticSearch, Sphinx, AWS CloudSearch, etc. But in this article we will talk about PostgreSQL. Starting from version 8.3, a full-text search support in PostgreSQL is available. Let's look at how it is implemented in the DBMS itself.

Jun 25, 2011Technology
Ajax blocks in Django

Quite often we have to write paginated or filtered blocks of information on page. I created a decorator that would automate this process.

May 12, 2010Technology
Twitter API, OAuth and decorators

In my current project I had a task to use twitter API. Twitter uses OAuth for authentication, which is pretty dreary. To avoid fiddling with it all the time, I've moved authentication to decorator. If key is available - nothing happens, just view is launched as usual. It's convenient that there's no need for additional twitter settings in user profile. Code is in article.

Mar 6, 2010TechnologyManagement
Supplementing settings in settings_local

For local project settings, I use old trick with settings_local file:try:from settings_local import \*except ImportError:passSo in settings_local.py we can override variables from settings.py. I didn't know how to supplement them. For example how to add line to INSTALLED_APPS without copying whole list.Yesterday I finally understood that I can import settings from settings_local:# settings_local.pyfrom settings import \*INSTALLED_APPS += (# ...)

Feb 18, 2010Technology
User profiles with inheritance in Django

Usually users' profiles are stored in single model. When there are multiple user types, separation is made by some field like user_type.Situation is a little more complicated when different data is needed for each user type.In this article I'll describe how I solve this task.