Getting Started¶
Installation¶
The Demo¶
While you’re welcome to use the setup instructions here, it may be easier to just try out the demo that comes with this package. The demo doesn’t cover all the use cases (yet) but it does cover most of the standard stuff.
Setting up the Models¶
There’s basically two parts to setting up the models. First, you have to
add notifications to the models that you want notifications about. Second,
you have to add channels to those notifications to specify where they
can be sent. Finally, you need to implement the AbstractContactable
interface for whatever your channels return so that we now how to contact
them.
If you only ever want to send notifications to the site contacts, you can skip step 2 and 3, but that’s not very fun, is it.
Adding Model Notifications¶
Notifications in django vox are centered around models. This is important, because it makes it possible to predictably know what parameters will be available in the notification templates, and provides a measure of sanity to whoever is editing them.
To add notifications to a model, change the parent class from
django.db.models.Model to django_vox.models.VoxModel.
Also, add VoxMeta inner class (much like django’s Meta)
which contains an attribute, named notifications. Set it to
a VoxNotifications object, and each parameter you pass to
it will specify the parameters for another notification. The
parameter keys are the notification’s codename and the values
are the the description (if they’re a plain string) or you can
use a VoxNotification object to specify more parameters.
class User(VoxModel):
class VoxMeta:
notifications = VoxNotifications(
create=_('Notification to that a user created an account'),
)
...
def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
new = self.id is None
super().save(*args, **kwargs)
if new:
self.issue_notification('create')
...
class PurchaseOrder(VoxModel):
class VoxMeta:
notifications = VoxNotifications(
received = _('Notification that an order was received.'),
on_hold = _('Notification that an order is on hold.'),
)
def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
new = self.id is None
if not new:
old = PurchaseOrder.objects.get(pk=self.pk)
super().save(*args, **kwargs)
if new:
self.issue_notification('received')
if not new and not old.on_hold and self.on_hold:
self.issue_notification('on_hold')
Here’s an example of the long-winded form to specify your parameters, This is more verbose, but makes it easier to specify extra notification parameters (like actor & target model) if you need them.
class User(VoxModel):
class VoxMeta:
notifications = VoxNotifications(
create=VoxNotification(
_('Notification to that a user created an account'),
actor_type='myapp.mymodel'),
)
Once you’ve finished adding these, you’ll need to regenerate the
notifications table using the make_notifications management command:
python3 manage.py make_notifications
Registering Objects and Channels¶
Channels are what allow you to select different recipients. The site contacts
channel is available by default, but if you want any other channels, you have
to create them yourself using the object registry at
django_vox.registry.objects. In order to use this, you need to first
register your object using objects.add(cls, regex=None), and then you can
access the channel registry as objects[cls].channels. You can add new
channels using either the add or add_self method takes four arguments:
key- A slug that identifies the channel. Should be unique per model.
name- A name that shows up in the admin. Optional, defaults to various automatic values.
recipient_type- Model class of the objects returned by the function. Optional, defaults
to the VoxModel subclass (i.e.
FooinFoo.add_channel). func- A function or method that returns the instances of
recipient_type. The function is called with a single argument which is the VoxModel instance that will eventually use it (i.e. thecontentobject). Optional, defaults tolambda x: x
An example of channels given the above code might look like this:
class PurchaseOrder(VoxModel):
...
def get_purchasers(self):
yield self.purchaser
def get_managers(self):
yield self.shop.manager
...
from django_vox.registry import objects
objects.add(User, regex=None)
objects[User].channels.add_self()
po_reg = objects.add(PurchaseOrder, regex=None)
po_reg.channels.add('purchaser', _('Purchaser'), User,
PurchaseOrder.get_purchasers)
po_reg.channels.add('manager', _('Manager'), User,
PurchaseOrder.get_managers)
Adding Contact Info¶
Now we have to implement the get_contacts_for_notification(notification)
method for all the things that are return in channels. In our above
example, that’s just the User model. This method takes a notification,
and returns all of the contacts that the object has enabled for that
notification. The idea behind this method is that it allows you to implement
your own notification settings on a per-contact basis.
For now, we’re just going to make an implementation that assumes every user will get email notifications for all notifications. We can alter the user class to look like this:
from django_vox.models import VoxModel
from django_vox.base import Contact
class User(VoxModel):
...
email = models.EmailField(max_length=254, unique=True)
def get_contacts_for_notification(notification):
return Contact(self.name, 'email', self.email)
Note
We haven’t covered actors or targets, but this example should be enough to get you started.
And there you have it. Now, in order for this to do anything useful, you’ll need to add some appropriate templates. In this case, you’ll want an email template for the “User” recipient of the “user created” notification, and possibly a template for a site contact too.
One-time Messages from the Admin¶
The normal way to handle notifications is call issue_notification(codename)
from within the code. It’s also possible to manually issue notifications
from the admin as long as a notification doesn’t have an actor/target model.
The other way of sending messages completely bypasses the Notification
models and uses an Admin Action.
In order to send messages this way, you need to add the
django_vox.admin.notify action to your ModelAdmin class. It might look
something like this:
from django.contrib import admin
from django_vox.admin import notify
class UserAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
actions = (notify, )
admin.site.register(YourUserModel, UserAdmin)
In order for this to work right, the model in question needs to implement
get_contacts_for_notification.
Note
Because we don’t actually have a notification model here, a fake
notification (django_vox.models.OneTimeNotification) is passed
to get_contacts_for_notification. This can be used if only want
certain contact methods to be accessible in this way.