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Showing posts from July, 2011

Django: Using Caching to Track Online Users

Recently I wanted a simple solution to track whether a user is online on a given Django site.  The definition of "online" on a site is kind of ambiguous, so I'll define that a user is considered to be online if they have made any request to the site in the last five minutes. I found that one approach is to use Django's caching framework to track when a user last accessed the site.  For example, upon each request, I can have a middleware set the current time as a cache value associated with a given user.  This allows us to store some basic information about logged-in user's online state without having to hit the database on each request and easily retrieve it by accessing the cache. My approach below.  Comments welcome. In settings.py: # add the middleware that you are about to create to settings MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = ( .... 'middleware.activeuser_middleware.ActiveUserMiddleware' , .... ) # Setup caching per Django docs. In actuality, you

Django Permission TemplateTag

In a previous post , I wrote about a way to keep track of user permissions on a model instance.  For example, I suggested that each model have a permissions subclass that could be instantiated with a user instance passed as a constructor argument.  Methods on that permissions class could then be called to determine if that user has permission to perform various actions. I also suggested that the threadlocals module could then be used to pass in the user instance to the permissions object in the Django template.  However, from various readings, I get the impression that threadlocals may not be the best thing for passing arguments in a template function.   Therefore, I decided to use a more traditional route of creating a template tag to do something similar. I created a template tag that lets you surround a block of HTML code to hide or show the contents based on the return value of the permission function.  The tag below basically says, "if the logged in user has 'can_edit