Dependencies

The script uses Django REST framework. You can install it by following this tutorial

Installation

pip install django_remote_model
pip install django-filter

Usage

They say a good example is worth 100 pages of API documentation. so let’s get started with an example

We will have two projects:

• The provider

• The consumer

we will assume that the provider has a model that the consumer need to access, let’s say this model is called ‘Product’.

so to create the apis to make it available to the consumer to connect to the provider we will use the ProviderViewGenerator and ModelViewSetGenerator methods from the package

# provider urls
from django_remote_model.provider.provider_view_set import ProviderViewGenerator, ModelViewSetGenerator


provider_view = ProviderViewGenerator(<model_class>, 'Remote-Model-Api-Key', 'KEY_Value')
model_view_set = ModelViewSetGenerator(<model_class>,'Remote-Model-Api-Key', 'KEY_Value')

router = SimpleRouter()
router.register('api/model', model_view_set)


urlpatterns =[
    path('api/<model>/provider/', provider_view),

] + router.urls

Now that we half the apis ready, it’s the consumer turn to connect to it, first let’s import the RemoteModel

from django_remote_model.remote_model import RemoteModel
remote_model = RemoteModel(model_name, provider_url,view_set_url, Remote_Model_Api_Key, KEY_Value, has_permission=false)

Explanation for the arguments: Argument | Function — | — model_name | The name of the model provider_url | The url for the ProviderViewGenerator view_set_url | The url for the ModelViewSetGenerator Remote_Model_Api_Key | The api Key KEY_Value | The Key has_permission | default False, Whether the model has permissions or not (useful when using the admin)

So far the following methods are tested

remote_model.model.objects.all()
remote_model.model.objects.get()
remote_model.model.objects.filter()
remote_model.model.objects.order_by()
remote_model.model.objects.distinct()
remote_model.model.objects.count()
remote_model.model.save()
remote_model.model.delete()

Best Practices

It’s better to have only one remote_model instance per api and to import it wherever you want it

The remote_model instance will update the model inside of it if any update happens in the fields from the provider but if you want to force update it you can run remote_model.update()

Permission

By default the remote model does not have permission of its own because it’s not generated from a migration, but you can create a migration for it by setting has_permission to True

but bear in mind that you will need to delete those permission by hand if you decided to change or remote the remote model

Usage with the Django Admin

The model can be used normally with the Django admin and it supports most of the admin functionality

from django.contrib import admin
from .models import remote_model

admin.site.register(remote_model.model)