Agenda

We have a Django project with multiple models. We want to add auditing to all/several of our models. Our auditing involves tracking the user who created a particular model instance.

A naive way to achieve it would be to set creator=request.user during instance initialization or during manager’s .create() call. This requires passing request.user to init() or manager’s create() from every view which saves a model instance. This approach would be ugly and make code unmaintainable.

There is a better way using which we can avoid passing request.user from every view during instance creation. This way involves creating a middleware and thread local object and using the thread local object in save() .

Ugly way

We want to audit every model and track creator of every model instance. Let’s create a BaseModel with a single field creator and make all other models extend from it.

# base/models.py from django.contrib.auth import User NULL_AND_BLANK = {'null': True, 'blank': True} class BaseModel(models.Model): creator = models.ForeignKey(User, **NULL_AND_BLANK) class Meta: abstract = True

Make model Name extend from BaseModel .

# names/models.py class Name(BaseModel): english_representation = models.CharField(max_length=100) vernacular_representation = models.CharField(max_length=100) def __unicode__(self): return self.english_representation

Assume there is a view which processes a form and creates a Name instance in the database. We want to audit Name and track the user who created this name.

# names/views.py @login_required def create_name(self, request): form = NameForm(data=request.POST or None) if form.is_valid(): Name.objects.create(english_representation=form.cleaned_data['english_representation'], vernacular_representation=form.cleaned_data['vernacular_representation'], creator=request.user) return render(request, 'names/name-create.html', {'form': form})

Or your view code could look like:

# names/views.py @login_required def create_name(request): form = NameForm(data=request.POST or None) if form.is_valid(): name = Name(english_representation=form.cleaned_data['english_representation'], vernacular_representation=form.cleaned_data['vernacular_representation'], creator=request.user) name.save() return render(request, 'names/name-create.html', {'form': form})

Notice that we had to pass creator=request.user .

You could have multiple views in your project which deal with object creation. You will have to pass request.user from every view where you want to audit the instance.

This approach is ugly.

Better way

We could add a middleware which sets request.user in a thread local object. We can override save() of base model and use the thread local object to set creator.

Let’s add a middleware.

# base/middleware.py import threading local = threading.local() class BaseMiddleware(object): def __init__(self, get_response): self.get_response = get_response def __call__(self, request): local.user = request.user response = self.get_response(request) return response

This middleware would ensure that local.user is set for every request which hits the server.

We must add base.middleware.BaseMiddleware after SessionMiddleware and AuthenticationMiddleware to ensure that request.user is correctly populated by the time our custom middleware, i.e BaseMiddleware is executed.

# settings.py MIDDLEWARE = [ 'django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware', 'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware', 'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware', 'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware', 'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware', 'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware', 'django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware', 'base.middleware.BaseMiddleware', ]

Next we need to override BaseModel.save().

# base/models.py from .middleware import local class BaseModel(models.Model): created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True) modified = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True) creator = models.ForeignKey(User, **NULL_AND_BLANK) def save(self, *args, **kwargs): if self.pk is None and hasattr(local, 'user'): self.creator = local.user return super(BaseModel, self).save(*args, **kwargs) class Meta: abstract = True

We can then modify view code to remove request.user from manager’s .create() calls.

@login_required def create_name(request): form = NameForm(data=request.POST or None) if form.is_valid(): name = Name.objects.create(english_representation=form.cleaned_data['english_representation'], vernacular_representation=form.cleaned_data['vernacular_representation']) return render(request, 'names/name-create.html', {'form': form})

Now creator would be set to request.user when a valid form is submitted, even though we didn’t pass creator from view.

Views which create an instance don’t need to pass creator anymore and still all models which extend from BaseModel would be audited.

If we create an instance from shell, then creator would be set to null because shell commands don’t invoke middleware code.

In [4]: Name.objects.create(english_representation='will', vernacular_representation='विल') Out[4]: <Name: will> In [5]: n = Name.objects.latest('pk') In [6]: n.english_representation Out[6]: u'will' In [8]: n.creator is None Out[8]: True

This approach looks much cleaner than passing creator from every instance creation view.

Thank you for reading the Agiliq blog. This article was written by Akshar on Jan 9, 2019 in python , django . You can subscribe ⚛ to our blog. We love building amazing apps for web and mobile for our clients. If you are looking for development help, contact us today ✉.