Comments on: Towards a Standard for Django Session Messages

By: tobias

tobias — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:41:38 +0000

A messages backend has been integrated in Django:

http://code.djangoproject.com/changeset/11804

It’s only in trunk at this point, but it’ll be released as part of Django 1.2. The documentation can be found here:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/messages/

Enjoy!

By: bbb

bbb — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 10:21:26 +0000

I needed this functionality and started to hack around the apparent lack of it–then thought twice. Googling a bit led me to Ticket #4604, and to here/django-notify. *Exactly* what I was looking for and works seamlessly. Props to the contributors, thanks!

By: tobias

tobias — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:42:40 +0000

The combo backend has been written (finally):

http://code.google.com/p/django-notify/issues/detail?id=5

By: tobias

tobias — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:54:22 +0000

I’d be happy to contribute the combo backend..traveling right now but I’ll look at it later this week.

By: SmileyChris

SmileyChris — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 02:29:25 +0000

Yep, django-notify comes with two temporary message storage backends. The first uses sessions, the other uses a signed cookie, just like Simon wants

The signed cookie backend doesn’t handle longer messages being stored server side, but another backend which handles that would be easy to write and I’d be happy to include it too (probably even make it default - it’s seems the best of both scenarios)

By: tobias

tobias — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:16:45 +0000

My understanding is that django-flash currently does not meet the conditions outlined above, but I think the author is working on some of them.

See conversation on this ticket:
http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/4604

By: Vinilios

Vinilios — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 01:38:44 +0000

how about django-flash ?
http://github.com/danielfm/django-flash/tree/master

we have used in a couple of my company projects, it does good job

By: tobias

tobias — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:08:43 +0000

I added a point about efficiency and avoiding the database hit if possible. Thanks for the suggestions Simon and Sean.

By: Sean Patrick Hogan

Sean Patrick Hogan — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:58:02 +0000

How time flies. I remember when I opened the ticket two years ago.

Simon is right that there’s no reason to make a round trip to the database to support this feature. However, many would argue (like Cal Henderson) that we don’t need to hit the database for sessions either. With 4096 bytes we can store and sign quite a bit of data in there.

Not that Rails is the gold standard in these things, but they do use sessions for this storage. I don’t personally have any stake in a certain method, but I would be happy to see it done.

I’m glad to see the conversation pick up on the ticket again. Hopefully it will make the 1.2 release and thanks to everyone working to get 1.1 out!

By: tobias

tobias — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:45:11 +0000

That sounds perfectly reasonable, maybe even better. I think django-notify has an option for cookie storage.

That said, I’ve had good luck with memcache as a session backend, which avoids the round trip to the database. And assuming the database is out of the picture, the session is also just a key that references a larger “message” stored on the server.

Still, your point is well taken. “Session Messages” was probably a poor title choice for this article.