django-herald 0.1.7

# django-herald

[](https://pypi-hypernode.com/pypi/django-herald)
[](https://travis-ci.org/worthwhile/django-herald)
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[](https://github.com/worthwhile/django-herald)

Django library for separating the message content from transmission method

# Installation

1. `pip install django-herald`
2. Add `herald` and `django.contrib.sites` to `INSTALLED_APPS`.
3. Add herald's URLS:

if settings.DEBUG:
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^herald/', include('herald.urls')),
] + urlpatterns

# Usage

1. Create a `notifications.py` file in any django app. This is where your notification classes will live. Add a class like this:

from herald import registry
from herald.base import EmailNotification


class WelcomeEmail(EmailNotification): # extend from EmailNotification for emails
template_name = 'welcome_email' # name of template, without extension
subject = 'Welcome' # subject of email

def __init__(self, user): # optionally customize the initialization
self.context = {'user': user} # set context for the template rendering
self.to_emails = [user.email] # set list of emails to send to

@staticmethod
def get_demo_args(): # define a static method to return list of args needed to initialize class for testing
from users.models import User
return [User.objects.order_by('?')[0]]

registry.register(WelcomeEmail) # finally, register your notification class

# Alternatively, a class decorator can be used to register the notification:

@registry.register_decorator()
class WelcomeEmail(EmailNotification):
...


2. Create templates for rendering the email using this file structure:

templates/
herald/
text/
welcome_email.txt
html/
welcome_email.html

3. Test how your email looks by navigating to `/herald/`.

4. Send your email wherever you need in your code:

WelcomeEmail(user).send()

5. View the sent emails in django admin and even be able to resend it.


## Deleting Old Notifications

The `delnotifs` command is useful for purging the notification history.

The default usage will delete everything from sent during today:

python manage.py delnotifs

However, you can also pass arguments for `start` or `end` dates. `end` is up to, but not including that date.

python manage.py delnotifs --start='2016-01-01' --end='2016-01-10'


## Asynchronous Email Sending

If you are sending slightly different emails to a large number of people, it might take quite a while to process. By default, Django will process this all synchronously. For asynchronous support, we recommend django-celery-email. It is very straightfoward to setup and integrate: https://github.com/pmclanahan/django-celery-email


## herald.contrib.auth

Django has built-in support for sending password reset emails. If you would like to send those emails using herald, you can use the notification class in herald.contrib.auth.

First, add `herald.contrib.auth` to `INSTALLED_APPS` (in addition to `herald`).

Second, use the `HeraldPasswordResetForm` in place of django's built in `PasswordResetForm`. This step is entirely dependant on your project structure, but it essentially just involves changing the form class on the password reset view in some way:

# you may simply just need to override the password reset url like so:
url(r'^password_reset/$', password_reset, name='password_reset', {'password_reset_form': HeraldPasswordResetForm}),

# of if you are using something like django-authtools:
url(r'^password_reset/$', PasswordResetView.as_view(form_class=HeraldPasswordResetForm), name='password_reset'),

# or you may have a customized version of the password reset view:
class MyPasswordResetView(FormView):
form_class = HeraldPasswordResetForm # change the form class here

# or, you may have a custom password reset form already. In that case, you will want to extend from the HeraldPasswordResetForm:
class MyPasswordResetForm(HeraldPasswordResetForm):
...

# alternatively, you could even just send the notification wherever you wish, seperate from the form:
PasswordResetEmail(some_user).send()

Third, you may want to customize the templates for the email. By default, herald will use the `registration/password_reset_email.html` that is provided by django for both the html and text versions of the email. But you can simply override `herald/html/password_reset.html` and/or `herald/text/password_reset.txt` to suit your needs.

## User Disabled Notifications

If you want to disable certain notifications per user, add a record to the UserNotification table and
add notifications to the disabled_notifications many to many table.

For example:

user = User.objects.get(id=user.id)

notification = Notification.objects.get(notification_class='MyNotification')

# disable the notification
user.usernotification.disabled_notifications.add(notification)

By default, notifications can be disabled. You can put can_disable = False in your notification class and the system will
populate the database with this default. Your Notification class can also override the verbose_name by setting it in your
inherited Notification class. Like this:

class MyNotification(EmailNotification):
can_disable = False
verbose_name = "My Required Notification"

## Email Attachments

To send attachments, assign a list of attachments to the attachments attribute of your EmailNotification instance, or override the get_attachments() method.

Each attachment in the list can be one of the following:

1. A tuple which consists of the filename, the raw attachment data, and the mimetype. It is up to you to get the attachment data. Like this:

raw_data = get_pdf_data()

email.attachments = [
('Report.pdf', raw_data, 'application/pdf'),
('report.txt', 'text version of report', 'text/plain')
]
email.send()

2. A MIMEBase object. See the documentation for attachments under EmailMessage Objects/attachments in the Django documentation.

3. A django `File` object.

### Inline Attachments

Sometimes you want to embed an image directly into the email content. Do that by using a MIMEImage assigning a content id header to a MIMEImage, like this:

email = WelcomeEmail(user)
im = get_thumbnail(image_file.name, '600x600', quality=95)
my_image = MIMEImage(im.read()) # MIMEImage inherits from MIMEBase
my_image.add_header('Content-ID', '<{}>'.format(image_file.name))

You can refer to these images in your html email templates using the Content ID (cid) like this:

<img src="cid:{{image_file.name}}" />

You would of course need to add the "image_file" to your template context in the example above. You can also accomplish this using file operations. In this example we overrode the get_attachments method of an EmailNotification.

class MyNotification(EmailNotification):
context = {'hello': 'world'}
template_name = 'welcome_email'
to_emails = ['somebody@example.com']
subject = "My email test"

def get_attachments(self):
fp = open('python.jpeg', 'rb')
img = MIMEImage(fp.read())
img.add_header('Content-ID', '<{}>'.format('python.jpeg'))
return [
img,
]

And in your template you would refer to it like this, and you would not need to add anything to the context:

<img src="cid:python.jpeg" />

### Other MIME attachments

You can also attach any MIMEBase objects as regular attachments, but you must add a content-disposition header, or they will be inaccessible:

my_image.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment; filename="python.jpg"')

Attachments can cause your database to become quite large, so you should be sure to run the management commands to purge the database of old messages.

# Running Tests

python runtests.py