Working with actions

Overview

What is an action?

An action is a task that user can do with portal site, or with some content.

Examples was:

  • PDF export of a content.
  • Send actual URL viewing to a somebody.
  • Add actual URL to facebook.

Actions categories

Actions are usually placed in different places in a site layout. The default categories are:

  • Site actions: actions enabled in all portal.
  • Content actions: actions enabled in a content view page.
  • User actions: usually user tools, only for logged users.

Actions rendering

This would be an example rendering:

... <!-- some stuff -->

<ul id="site-actions">
{% get_actions "site" as site_actions %}
{% for action in site_actions %}
  <li id="action-{{ action.name }}">
    <a href="{{ action.get_url }}">{% trans action.verbose_name %}</a>
  </li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

... <!-- more stuff -->

<ul id="content-actions">
{% get_actions "content" for content as content_actions %}
{% for action in content_actions %}
  <li id="action-{{ action.name }}">
    <a href="{{ action.get_url }}">{% trans action.verbose_name %}</a>
  </li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

... <!-- more stuff -->

<ul id="user-actions">
{% get_actions "user" as user_actions %}
{% for action in user_actions %}
  <li id="action-{{ action.name }}">
    <a href="{{ action.get_url }}">{% trans action.verbose_name %}</a>
  </li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

... <!-- now... we place all user actions -->

<ul id="all-user-actions">
{% for user in all_users %}
  {% get_actions "user" for user as user_actions %}
  {% for action in user_actions %}
    <li id="action-{{ action.name }}">
      <a href="{{ action.get_url }}">{% trans action.verbose_name %}</a>
    </li>
  {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}
</ul>

Actions URLs

By default, all actions go to action.urls dispatcher, for perform one action. The URL was:

  • for all site actions: /actions/site/$action_name/
  • for all content actions /actions/content/$content_type_id/$content_id/$action_name/
  • for all user actions /actions/user/$username/$action_name/

All this URLs will call to views defined in actions.views. These views will call to perform method in action dispatcher, which is a class definition for this action. See next point for more information.

Programming actions

Actions definition

Action perform usually will occurs in some plugin views. For this reason, an action usually will redirect to one view, with right parameters.

This fragment would be an example for action definitions:

Note

Why dont perform action in action definition class itself? Because less coupling principle: you can have some utility views that make some process (maybe in other apps)... This is independent from actions links. Think in a third app reusable view like this:

If you find a view like previous, you can use it as usual.

Actions registry and configuration

Actions registry and configuration setup are implemented using registry application (more info in registry documentation). See this example:

from django.conf import settings
from django.utils.translation import ugettext as _

from registry import params

class PDFExport(ContentAction):
   # ... more stuff
   config_params = [
       params.Single(_('HTML to PDF binary'), default='/usr/bin/pdftotext'),
   ]


class SendPage(SiteAction):
   # ... more stuff
   config_params = [
       params.Single(name='from_email',
                     verbose_name=_('From email address'),
                     default=settings.DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL),
       params.List(name='cc_emails',
                   verbose_name=_('CC email addresses'))
   ]

This config parameters would be customized in merengue admin interface.

For accessing to configuration inside an app, you can do like this:

>>> from merengue.registry import get_item
>>> plugins.myplugin.actions import SendPage
>>> sendpage_action = get_item(SendPage)
>>> sendpage_action.get_config()['cc_emails'].get_value()
['info@yoursite.com',]
>>> sendpage_action.get_config()['cc_emails'].label
'CC email addresses'

Then, you can have a decoupled actions from a reusable view with this code:

class SendPage(SiteAction):
   # ... more stuff
   def get_url(self, request):
      return HttpResponseRedirect(
          reverse("sendpage",
                  args=[request.get_full_path()],
                  kwargs={'from_email': self.get_config()['from_email'].get_value(),
                          'cc_emails': self.get_config()['cc_emails'].get_value(),}),
      )

Or inside view:

from merengue.registry import get_item
from plugins.myplugin.actions import SendPage

def sendpage(request, request_path):
   sendpage_action = get_item(SendPage)
   from_email = sendpage_action.get_config()['from_email'].get_value()
   # ... do stuff

Other way is using actions.get_action function:

from merengue.action import get_action

def sendpage(request, path_to_send):
    reg_action = get_action('sendpage')
    from_email = reg_action.config['from_email']
    cc_emails = reg_action.config['cc_emails']
    # do your staff ...
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