Notice creation

In the noticebox.handlers module are defined following callables for a notice creation:

save_notice(users, preset=None, **kwargs)

Creates a notice model instance and saves it in the database.

mail_notice(users, preset=None, **kwargs)

Creates an email messages with the notice and sends it.

user_notice(users, preset=None, **kwargs)

Saves notice in the database and sends email. Effectively calls both save_notice and mail_notice.

All the handlers follow same signature. The first argument should be a user instance, a user list or a user queryset. The subject and body strings should be given as keyword arguments:

user_notice(user, subject="Hello!", body="Hello,\nhow are you?")

The save_notice and mail_notice handlers are actually class instances so they can be customized if necessary.

user_notice(user, preset="welcome", username="alice")

Notice display (views)

Notices in a database can be displayed on the web site when user logs in. Two class based views are defined in the noticebox.views module:

NoticeListView

Displays paginated list of notices for the authenticated user.

NoticeDetailView

Display notice detail and marks it as read.

Both views are included in the noticebox.urls urlpatterns which means that if no customization is needed then they can be simply included in the url configuration:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # ...
    (r'^notices/', include('noticebox.urls')),
    # ...
)

Simple templates for the views are present but it may be better to override them for real projects.

Context processor

The application provides a context processor which makes count of unread messages available in the template:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    # ...
    'noticebox.context_processors.notices',
    # ...
)

The unread notice count is available in the notice_unread_count variable. No database queries are executed until it is necessary.