Welcome to django-smartfields’s documentation!

Django Model Fields that are smart

This application introduces a totally new way of handling field’s values through unique ways they are assigned and processed. It is so simple that nothing needs to be done in order to start using it, yet it is so powerful, that it can handle automatic image and video file conversions with a simple specification of a conversion function. Check it out, and it will forever change the way you handle Model Fields.

Installation

pip install django-smartfields

Latest build

Forkme on Github: django-smartfields

Introduction

Here is a short introduction of how this app works and a simple example how it can be used.

First of all, as name suggests, it mainly deals with Model Fields, hence it is supplied with a custom version of every Django’s Field. There is no difference form original versions of fields in terms of interaction with database, forms or with any other Django codebase, so both kinds of fields can be used together safely and interchangeably. Main distinction form Django’s fields is that all smartfields accept a keyword argument dependencies, which should be a list of Dependency's or FileDependency's.

Dependency is a concept that allows you to change the value of any field or an attribute attached to the model instance, including the field Dependency which it is specified for. Each Dependency handles the value from a field through Processors which are functions that can be accepted as default, pre_processor and processor kwargs. An actual model attribute or a field which a processed value will be assigned to is specified by one or none of the kwargs suffix and attname. More details on those see documentation in Dependencies and Processors sections, but for now let’s see a couple of simple examples.

Example

Let’s say we have a Product model where a slug needs to be automatically generated from product’s name and also properly modified to look like a slug.

from django.db.models import models
from django.utils.text import slugify
from smartfields import fields
from smartfields.dependencies import Dependency

def name_getter(value, instance, **kwargs):
    return instance.name

class Product(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    slug = fields.SlugField(dependencies=[
        Dependency(default=name_getter, processor=slugify)
    ])

Here is what will happen in above example whenever an instance of Product is created:

  • Whenever Product is initilized and slug field is empty, it will attempt to get a value from name field. In case when it is still empty before model is being saved it will attempt to get the value again, all because of default function name_getter.
  • Right before the model is saved processor function slugify will be invoked, and value of the field from name will be modified to look like a slug. Important part is, processor will be invoked only whenever the value of slug field has changed.

Important Perculiarities

  • Fields are processed in order they are specified in a Model.
  • Dependencies are processed in the order they are speciefied in the dependencies list, except the ones with async flag, these are processed last, but also in the order they were specified.

More Details

Project Info

Indices and tables