Django-Dynamic-model

This package is used to connect two independent django projects together via rest apis while providing the same interface that a normal django model class will have.

This package is written to support to support one admin across multiple apps, but it can be used in many other ways

Dependencies

The script uses Django REST framework. You can install it by following this tutorial

Installation

pip install django_remote_model
pip install django-filter

Usage

They say a good example is worth 100 pages of API documentation. so let's get started with an example

We will have two projects:

The provider
The consumer

we will assume that the provider has a model that the consumer need to access, let's say this model is called 'Product'.

so to create the apis to make it available to the consumer to connect to the provider we will use the ProviderViewGenerator and ModelViewSetGenerator methods from the package

# provider urls
from django_remote_model.provider.provider_view_set import ProviderViewGenerator, ModelViewSetGenerator


provider_view = ProviderViewGenerator(<model_class>, 'Remote-Model-Api-Key', 'KEY_Value')
model_view_set = ModelViewSetGenerator(<model_class>,'Remote-Model-Api-Key', 'KEY_Value')

router = SimpleRouter()
router.register('api/model', model_view_set)


urlpatterns =[
    path('api/<model>/provider/', provider_view),

] + router.urls

Now that we half the apis ready, it's the consumer turn to connect to it, first let's import the RemoteModel

from django_remote_model.remote_model import RemoteModel
remote_model = RemoteModel(model_name, provider_url,view_set_url, api_key_header_name, api_key, has_permission=false)

Explanation for the arguments:

Argument	Function
model_name	The name of the model
provider_url	The url for the `ProviderViewGenerator`
view_set_url	The url for the `ModelViewSetGenerator`
api_key_header_name	The api Key
api_key	The Key
has_permission	default `False`, Whether the model has permissions or not (useful when using the admin)

So far the following methods are tested

remote_model.model.objects.all()
remote_model.model.objects.get()
remote_model.model.objects.filter()
remote_model.model.objects.order_by()
remote_model.model.objects.distinct()
remote_model.model.objects.count()
remote_model.model.save()
remote_model.model.delete()

Best Practices

It's better to have only one remote_model instance per api and to import it wherever you want it

The remote_model instance will update the model inside of it if any update happens in the fields from the provider but if you want to force update it you can run remote_model.update()

Permission

By default the remote model does not have permission of its own because it's not generated from a migration, but you can create a migration for it by setting has_permission to True

but bear in mind that you will need to delete those permission by hand if you decided to change or remove the remote model

Usage with the Django Admin

The model can be used normally with the Django admin and it supports most of the admin functionality

from django.contrib import admin
from .models import remote_model

admin.site.register(remote_model.model)

Advanced Admin usage

Keep in mind that the remote model is changing so to decrease the maintenance as possible it's preferred to keep every thing as dynamic as possible

class Admin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    # using list filter
    list_filter = ('column1','column1')
    # list_display using list field from the model itself
    list_display = [field.name for field in remote_model.model._meta.fields if field.name not in ['_state', '_meta']]
    
admin.site.register(remote_model.model, Admin)

TO DO

Add a migration command to add and remove the permission automatically

MinaAtef1/Django-Remote-Model