Model Dispatchers

Model dispatchers are a way to reduce complexity of _pre_save and _post_save methods of the SmartModel. A common use-case of these methods is to perform some action based on the change of the model, e.g. send a notification e-mail when the state of the invoice changes.

Better alternative is to define a handler function encapsulating the action that should happen when the model changes in a certain way. This handler is registered on the model using a proper dispatcher.

class chamber.models.dispatchers.BaseDispatcher

So far, there are two types of dispatchers but you are free to subclass the BaseDispatcher class to create your own, see the code as reference. During save of the model, the __call__ method of all dispatchers is invoked with following parameters:

1. obj instance of the model that is being saved
2. changed_fields list of field names that was changed since the last save
3. **kwargs custom keyword arguments passed to the save method

The moment when the handler should be fired may be important. Therefore, you can select signal that defines when dispatcher will be infoked. There is two signals: chamber.models.signals.dispatcher_pre_save or chamber.models.signals.dispatcher_post_save Both groups are dispatched immediately after the _pre_save or _post_save method respectively.

When the handler is fired, it is passed a single argument – the instance of the SmartModel being saved. Here is an example of a handler registered on a User model:

def send_email(user):
    # Code that actually sends the e-mail
    send_html_email(recipient=user.email, subject='Your profile was updated')

class chamber.models.dispatchers.PropertyDispatcher

PropertyDispatcher is a versatile dispatcher that fires the given handler when a specified property of the model evaluates to True.

The example shows how to to register the aforementioned send_email handler to be dispatched after saving the object if the property should_send_email returns True.

class MySmartModel(chamber_models.SmartModel):

    email_sent = models.BooleanField()

    dispatchers = (
        PropertyDispatcher(send_email, 'should_send_email', dispatcher_post_save),
    )

    @property
    def should_send_email(self):
        return not self.email_sent

class chamber.models.dispatchers.StateDispatcher

StateDispatcher can be used to dispatch a handler when a value of some model field changes to a specific value. In the following example, we register a my_handler function to be dispatched during the _pre_save method when the state changes to SECOND.

def my_handler(my_smart_model): # Do that useful stuff
    pass

class MySmartModel(chamber\_models.SmartModel):

    STATE = ChoicesNumEnum(
        ('FIRST', _('first'), 1),
        ('SECOND', _('second'), 2),
    )
    state = models.IntegerField(choices=STATE.choices, default=STATE.FIRST)

    dispatchers = (
        StateDispatcher(my_handler, STATE, state, STATE.SECOND, signal=dispatcher_pre_save),
    )