Add slug field to your mongoengine based documents

This package provides an easy way to add slugs to your mongoengine documents. Built for flask but can be easily modified for other web frameworks like django.

Features

Auto-generation of slugs and handling of conflicts for the slug values.
Support for case-insenstive slug values with a redirect (from the unintended one to the right one).
Support for changing of slug value without breaking the old links. It adds a redirect from old slug to new slug.
An easy to use SlugMixin to add to your Document classes to add slug support.
And an easy to use decorator for your views to transparently convert slugs to objects.

How to use it

First install the dependencies: flask, mongoengine & pymongo.

Let's say, you have the following document:

from mongoengine import *

class User( Document):
    name = StringField()
    email = StringField()
    password = StringField()

You want to add slug to this document. So, modify the code:

from mongoengine import *
from slugifier.slug import SlugMixin

class User( Document, SlugMixin):
    name = StringField()
    email = StringField()
    password = StringField()

    meta = { "indexes": ["slug"] }

    def slug_base_text( self):
        return self.name

Here, you add SlugMixin to your User class. This will add a "slug" field to all your User documents.

Next, you add an index on slug so that we can do the look ups based on that.

Finally, you add a method "slug_base_text()" to tell the SlugMixin what text to use to generate the slug.

Now, over to the views. Let's say, user profile is at the url: /user/<user_slug>. To construct your views, you have two options:

@app.route( "/user/<slug>")
def view_user_profile( slug):
    user = User.objects.get( slug=slug)
    ...

Here, you directly lookup the user with the given slug.

Second option uses a decorator and is more feature rich.

from slugifier.slug import slug_to_obj_converter

@app.route("/user/<slug>")
@slug_to_obj_converter( User, "/user/%s")
def view_user_profile( user):
    ...

In this case, you use the slug_to_obj_converter decorator from the slugifier package. It does a couple of things:

First, it converts the slug to User object after doing a quick lookup and passes that User object.
Also, if the slug doesn't exist, it will raise 404.
Next, it will do a case-sensitive redirect. Let's say, user's name is "Ram Gupta" and hence the slug is "Ram-Gupta". Now, if someone tries to access "/user/ram-gupta", this decorator will just do a redirect to "/user/Ram-Gupta". Neat?
Finally, it does a redirect from old slug to new slug. Let's say, your user gave the name as "Some Name". The slug will be "Some-Name". Now the user changes name to "Some Other Name". The slug will become "Some-Other-Name". What happens to the old urls? If some accesses "/user/Some-Name" now, the decorator will do a seamless redirect to the new url "/user/Some-Other-Name".

manasgarg/slugifier

Add slug field to your mongoengine based documents

Features

How to use it