README.rst

Introduction

django-ucamlookup is a library which provides useful methods and templates to integrate your Django application with the University of Cambridge University Lookup service.

Use

Install django-ucamlookup using pip:

pip install django-ucamlookup

Add django-ucamlookup to your installed applications in your project configuration settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS=(
...
    'ucamlookup',
...
),

and the urls entries in the urls.py file:

urlpatterns = patterns(
...
    # lookup/ibis urls
    url(r'^ucamlookup/', include('ucamlookup.urls')),
...
)

Requirements and warning

This module will only work inside the University of Cambridge network. Make sure your users are authenticated as University of Cambridge users (you can use the django-ucamwebauth module) or you will be exposing personal data to non authorised users.

Lookup User

django-ucamlookup modifies a User object each time is going to be saved, either new or update, and assigns to its last_name property the visible name from lookup for that user. The username is used to search for this user in lookup.

Lookup Group

django-ucamlookup includes a new model called LookupGroup that it is used to cache lookup models. It is used to store the lookup group id and its name, and therefore used to reduce the number of call to the lookup service. It can also be used to create relation with other models. For example, let's say we have a model called Secret and we only want to let access to it to users inside a certain group or groups. We will create a ManyToMany relation from Secrets to LookupGroup.

The name of the group is retrieve from the lookup service each time the group is saved (new or updated). The name is stored in the name property of the class and the id of the lookup group is stored in lookup_id.

It is important to say that this model is not used to cache relations between lookup users and lookup groups. These relations are always queried to the live lookup service. The model is only used to let the developer make relations between models that include lookup groups and cache the name of the group.

Template macros

Two macros are available to be used in a template: ucamlookup_users, and ucamlookup_groups. These macros have javascript functions that will modify a html input tag to an interactive ajax box with interaction to the lookup service that will let the user use autocomplete and search for lookup users and groups.

If you want to include an input box to let the user search and introduce a single user or a list of users, use the ucamlookup_users macro. You should pass as parameters to the macro the html input tag id that you want to modify/use and if you want to let the user select one or more users with the parameter multiple:

{% include 'ucamlookup_users.html' with input_tag_id="lookup_users" multiple=true user_list="authors" %}

If you want to show existing records in the input tag you will need to pass to the view the list of crsids. This list needs to be passed inside a dictionary called loockup_lists. The key entry name of the dictionary where the list is located it is passed to the macro using the variable user_list as shown previously. In this example:

lookup_lists = {
    'authors': post.users.all(),
}

You will also have to include the following macro in the head of your template to load the js and css files associated. These macros require jquery if you want to include your own jquery library or you are already using it in your template use the parameter jquery to specify it.

{% include 'ucamlookup_headers.html' with jquery=True %}

And your input tag will be transform into an ajax box that allows the user to search for users using lookup either using their username or their complete name. A list of crsids will be sent as the value of the input tag.

The same will work for lookup groups, just substitute user by group in the id and in the include.

Admin interface

The admin interface is tunned to add managing options for the LookupGroup model. The add option will show the same ajax-lookup-integrated-input as the template macros described above.

It also changes the add form for the user and it also shows an interactive ajax lookup-integrated input form when the admin wants to add a new user to the app.

These input forms allow to search for name and crsid in the case of a new user and for name in the case of a lookup group.

Available functions

The module also provides some useful functions to use in your app that do all the calls to the lookup service needed.

get_group_ids_of_a_user_in_lookup(user): Returns the list of group ids of a user

user_in_groups(user, lookup_groups): Check in the lookup webservice if the user is member of any of the groups in the LookupGroup list passed by parameter. Returns True if the user is in any of the groups or False otherwise

def get_institutions(user=None): Returns the list of institutions using the lookup ucam service. The institutions of the user passed by parameters will be shown first in the list returned

validate_crsids(crsids_text): It receives a list of crsids (comming from input tag from the template macros described previously) [wich format is separated by commas and with no spaces in between] and returns a list of Users corresponding to the crsids passed.

get_or_create_user_by_crsid(crsid): Returns the User corresponding to the crsid passed. If it does not exists in the database, it is created.

get_institution_name_by_id(institution_id, all_institutions=None): Returns the name of an institution by the id passed. If all_institutions is passed (the result from get_institutions) then the search is done locally using this list instead of a lookup call.

The last two methods can be used to add institutions to a model and show the name instead of the code in the admin interface

class MyModelAdmin(ModelAdmin):
    all_institutions = get_institutions()

    model = MyModel
    list_display = ('institution', )
    list_filter = ('institution_id', )

    def institution(self, obj):
        return get_institution_name_by_id(obj.institution_id, self.all_institutions)

    institution.admin_order_field = 'institution_id'

Developing

Run tests

Tox is configured to run on a container with a matrix execution of different versions of python and django combined. It will also show the coverage and any possible PEP8 violations.

$ docker-compose up