Supporting Integrations¶

Architecture¶

To start with, let’s discuss the architecture.

Integrations are subclasses of Integration. There’s only ever one instance per class. Each instance may have zero or more configurations, defined as an application-provided subclass of BaseIntegrationConfig.

Integrations and configurations are managed by an instance of IntegrationManager.

Many classes need to know about the manager instance, which can’t be determined automatically (and, theoretically, there may be multiple managers in a single application). These classes will inherit from NeedsIntegrationManagerMixin. It’s the application’s responsibility to subclass these classes and provide the necessary method for returning the integration, which we’ll get to later.

IntegrationConfigForm provides UI and logic for creating or editing integration configurations.

BaseIntegrationHook provides base support for an extension hook, which is useful if you’re supporting extensions in your application.

There are views for listing and configuring integrations. These must be subclassed, which we’ll cover in more detail.

Updating Settings¶

First, you’ll need to update your Django settings in order to use the integrations framework.

We’re going to assume in these examples that you’re creating a new myproject.integrations app. Put that and djblets.integrations in your settings.INSTALLED_APPS, like so:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'djblets.integrations',
    'myproject.integrations',
    ...
]

Now add the middleware:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = [
    ...
    'djblets.integrations.middleware.IntegrationsMiddleware',
    ...
]

If you’re also using djblets.extensions, make sure to include this after the extensions middleware:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = [
    ...
    'djblets.extensions.middleware.ExtensionsMiddleware',
    'djblets.integrations.middleware.IntegrationsMiddleware',
    ...
]

Setting up IntegrationManager¶

Your application will need an instance of IntegrationManager. This should only be created once per process, and every request for this manager must receive the same instance.

When constructing the manager, a subclass of BaseIntegrationConfig will need to be provided. We’ll go into what’s needed here, but keep this in mind for now.

Let’s put this in myproject/integrations/base.py. You’ll want something like:

from djblets.integrations.manager import IntegrationManager


_integration_manager = None


def get_integration_manager():
    global _integration_manager

    if not _integration_manager:
        _integration_manager = IntegrationManager(MyIntegrationConfig)

    return _integration_manager

You now have a handy function for getting the same instance, and for using your MyIntegrationConfig (which you’ll create soon).

You’re also going to want a mixin that provides this integration manager to various classes. Add:

class GetIntegrationManagerMixin(object):
    @classmethod
    def get_integration_manager(self):
        return get_integration_manager()

Congrats, you’re one step closer to supporting integrations!

Creating an IntegrationConfig¶

BaseIntegrationConfig is the base class for an integration configuration database model. This stores identifying information used to associate the configuration with a given integration, a description of the configuration, the enabled state, settings, and more.

Applications must have a subclass of this in a myproject/integrations/models.py, providing it to the IntegrationManager as shown above. You’ll want to mix in your GetIntegrationManagerMixin, like so:

from djblets.integrations.models import BaseIntegrationConfig

from myproject.integrations.base import GetIntegrationManagerMixin


class IntegrationConfig(GetIntegrationManagerMixin, BaseIntegrationConfig):
    pass

That’s all you need to do to get started. If you want to add some additional fields (for example, to associate one of these with a specific user, organization, etc.), then you can add fields here. For example:

Setting Up Views¶

Now that you have the base foundation for integrations and their configuration and management, you’ll need to get some views going.

Djblets ships with base views for listing integrations and creating/editing configurations. These are BaseIntegrationListView and BaseIntegrationConfigFormView.

It also ships with versions intended for use in the administration UI: BaseAdminIntegrationListView and BaseAdminIntegrationConfigFormView.

In these examples, we’re going to assume you’re using views for the administration UI.

Whichever views you choose to use will need to be subclassed, using your GetIntegrationManagerMixin above. This is as simple as placing the following in a myproject/integrations/views.py:

from djblets.integrations.views import (BaseAdminIntegrationConfigFormView,
                                        BaseAdminIntegrationListView)

from myproject.integrations.base import GetIntegrationManagerMixin


class AdminIntegrationConfigFormView(GetIntegrationManagerMixin,
                                     BaseAdminIntegrationConfigFormView):
    pass


class AdminIntegrationListView(GetIntegrationManagerMixin,
                               BaseAdminIntegrationListView):
    pass

You can customize some other behavior of these views as well. See their documentation for more information.

Setting up URLs¶

Now that you have your views, you’ll need to build URLs for them. In this example, we’ll place them in your myproject/urls.py:

from django.conf.urls import include, patterns, url
from djblets.integrations.urls import build_integration_urlpatterns

from myproject.integrations.views import (AdminIntegrationConfigFormView,
                                          AdminIntegrationListView)


urlpatterns = patterns(
    '',

    url('^admin/integrations/', include(build_integration_urlpatterns(
        list_view_cls=AdminIntegrationListView,
        config_form_view_cls=AdminIntegrationConfigFormView))),

    ...
)

You should now be set! If you go to http://yourserver/admin/integrations/, you should see a list of all your integrations (none, at this moment), and will have UI for configuring them.

You can now start writing integrations.

Adding Fields to IntegrationConfig¶

You may want to add some special fields to your configuration model. For instance, you may want to associate it with a user, or an organization model, or maybe you want to store something else entirely.

To do this, you’ll first need to add the fields to your configuration model. We’ll show this off with a User association:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from djblets.integrations.models import BaseIntegrationConfig

from myproject.integrations.base import GetIntegrationManagerMixin


class IntegrationConfig(GetIntegrationManagerMixin, BaseIntegrationConfig):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name='integration_configs')

This will give us an association between users and their integration configurations.

Next, you may want a special subclass of IntegrationConfigForm that can work with this new field:

from django import forms
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from djblets.integrations.forms import (IntegrationConfigForm as
                                        BaseIntegrationConfigForm)


class IntegrationConfigForm(BaseIntegrationConfigForm):
    model_fields = (
        BaseIntegrationConfigForm.model_fields +
        ('user',)
    )

    user = forms.ModelChoiceField(
        label='User',
        queryset=User.objects.all(),
        required=True)

This gives you a form that will contain these extra fields. Note that these fields will, in the default template, be presented to the user. This may not be what you want, depending on your use case!