Handy

A collection of different tools, shortcuts, decorators, form and model fields to make your django life easier.

Installation

pip install handy

Overview

Here are quick overview of what you can do with handy. You can also read full docs.

Avoid HttpResponse and render_to_response() biolerplate with @render_to() decorator. This one will render result dict to 'app_name/foo.html':

@render_to()
def foo(request):
    return {
        'bar': Bar.objects.all()
        # You can easily override default template, content type,
        # status code and add cookies to response:
        'STATUS': 410,
        'CONTENT_TYPE': 'text/plain'
    }

Easy JSON responders with @render_to_json() decorator:

@render_to_json()
def posts_by_tag(request, tag=None):
    posts = Post.object.values().filter(tag=tag)
    return list(posts)

And higher order @ajax decorator to handle more complex asynchronous actions:

@ajax
@ajax.login_required
@ajax.catch(Post.DoesNotExist)
def enable_post(request):
    post = Post.objects.get(pk=request.GET['id'])

    if post.author != request.user:
        raise ajax.error('permission_denied')

    post.enabled = True
    post.save()

Send emails rendered from templates:

render_to_email(article.author.email, 'approved.html', {'article': article})

A collection of model fields with accompanying form fields and widgets. Most notably diffrent array fields to store array of values or choices:

DAYS = zip(range(7), 'Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat'.split())

class Company(models.Model):
    phones = StringArrayField('Phone numbers', blank=True, default='{}')
    workdays = IntegerArrayField('Work days', choices=DAYS)

company = Company(phones=['234-5016', '516-2314'], workdays=[1,2,3,4])
company.save()

In model form phones field would be represented as CommaSeparatedInput and workdays as multiple checkboxes:

class CompanyForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Company

And a middleware to make your html output slimmer by stripping out unnecessary spaces:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    ...
    'handy.middleware.StripWhitespace',
)

And more:

• generic master slave database router with a couple of utilities
• simple logger wrap up
• JSONField, AdditionalAutoField and BigAutoField
• and a couple of text and debugging utilities

How you can help

• give me any feedback. What bits are most useful? What can be added or changed?
• bring your ideas and/or code that can make all our django experience more fun

TODO

• translate comments for model fields
• docs for db and text utils
• add support for querysets and models in JSON decorators