Writing Avatar Services¶

Overview¶

Avatar services provide your application with customizable ways for users to pick an avatar. Avatar services also cache the result of lookup for each user and size requested on the current django.http.HttpRequest

Subclassing Avatar Services¶

Avatar services are intended to be subclassed. They have two attributes that subclasses must override:

avatar_service_id: The service’s

unique identifier. This must be unique across all avatar services.

name: The service’s human-readable name.

Subclasses must also override:

get_avatar_urls_uncached():

This method computes and returns the avatar URLs for the given user at a requested size at different resolutions.

get_etag_data():

This method returns a list of unicode strings that uniquely identify the avatar services and its configuration. For caching, this method needs to be overridden.

For example

from django.utils.html import escape, mark_safe


class MyAvatarService(AvatarService):
    avatar_service_id = 'my-avatar-service'
    name = 'My Avatar Service'

    def get_avatar_urls_uncached(self, user, size):
        url = 'https://example.com/avatars/%s/%d.png'
        return {
            '1x': mark_safe(url % (escape(user.username), size)),
            '2x': mark_safe(url % (escape(user.username), size * 2)),
        }

The result of this method must return Django safe text objects in the dict. Otherwise, they may become escaped when being rendered to HTML (as the template includes the URLs as-is).

A further example is available in GravatarService, which provides Gravatars as avatars.