django-user-tasks

django-user-tasks is a reusable Django application for managing user-triggered asynchronous tasks. It provides a status page for each such task, which includes a meaningful progress indicator if the task is currently being executed and provides any appropriate text and/or links for output once the task is complete.

In Open edX, such tasks include operations such as exporting or importing a course, sending an email to all the students in a course, uploading a video, and other tasks which often take too long to perform during a single web request (as outlined in OEP-3). However, this has been written with the intention of being useful in a variety of Django projects outside the Open edX platform as well.

Note that this library was created as a consolidation of lessons learned from implementing such tasks in various parts of the Open edX code base. They don’t yet all use this library, but the plan is to over time refactor many of them to do so.

Overview

django-user-tasks is currently a wrapper for Celery (although the hope is that it could also be extended to also support channels and other asynchronous task queues). By extending the provided UserTask class (or adding UserTaskMixin to an existing Task subclass) and providing a user_id task argument, the task’s status is stored in a database table separate from the Celery broker and result store. This UserTaskStatus model allows for full database queries of the tasks that users are most likely to care about while not imposing any restrictions on the Celery configuration most appropriate for the site’s overall needs for asynchronous task processing.

Most of the status updating is handled automatically via Celery’s signals mechanism, but it can be enhanced by:

Overriding the UserTaskMixin methods such as generate_name and calculate_total_steps for particular types of tasks
Calling some of the UserTaskStatus methods like increment_completed_steps and set_state from the task implementation
Saving task output as instances of the UserTaskArtifact model

Documentation

The full documentation is at https://django-user-tasks.readthedocs.org.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the Apache Software License 2.0 unless otherwise noted.

Please see LICENSE.txt for details.

How To Contribute

Contributions are very welcome.

Please read How To Contribute for details.

Even though they were written with edx-platform in mind, the guidelines should be followed for Open edX code in general.

Reporting Security Issues

Please do not report security issues in public. Please email security@edx.org.

Getting Help

Have a question about this repository, or about Open edX in general? Please refer to this list of resources if you need any assistance.

Change Log

Unreleased

[1.0.0] - 2020-03-18

Removed

Dropped Python 2.7 support

[0.3.0] - 2019-12-15

Added

Added support for Django 2.2

[0.2.1] - 2019-09-25

Changed

start_user_task should only close obsolete connections if the current connection is NOT in an atomic block (which fixes errors on devstack studio/course-publishing).

[0.2.0] - 2019-08-30

Changed

Have the start_user_task receiver close obsolete connections before starting the task.

[0.1.9] - 2019-08-27

Changed

Fix issue with UserTaskArtifactAdmin and UserTaskStatusAdmin where ordering attribute must be a tuple or list.

[0.1.8] - 2019-08-22

Changed

Improve list display for ModelAdmin.

[0.1.7] - 2019-05-29

Changed

Make UserTaskArtifact.url a TextField with a URLValidator instead of a URLField.

[0.1.6] - 2019-05-29

Changed

Upgrade requirements.
Change max_length of UserTaskArtifact.url from 200 to 512.

[0.1.5] - 2017-08-03

Changed

Added testing/support for Django 1.11.

[0.1.4] - 2017-01-30

Changed

Slightly improved handling of tasks which start before their status records are committed (due to database transactions). Also documented how to avoid this problem in the first place.

[0.1.3] - 2017-01-03

Changed

Tasks which were explicitly canceled, failed, or retried no longer have their status changed to Succeeded just because the task exited cleanly.
Celery tasks which fail to import cleanly by name (because they use a custom name which isn’t actually the fully qualified task name) are now just ignored in the before_task_publish signal handler.

[0.1.2] - 2016-12-05

Changed

Add a migration to explicitly reference the setting for artifact file storage. This setting is likely to vary between installations, but doesn’t affect the generated database schema. This change should prevent makemigrations from creating a new migration whenever the setting value changes.

[0.1.1] - 2016-10-11

Changed

Fix Travis configuration for PyPI deployments.
Switch from the Read the Docs Sphinx theme to the Open edX one for documentation.

[0.1.0] - 2016-10-07

Added

First attempt to release on PyPI.

Metadata

Release files for django-user-tasks 1.0.0

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for django-user-tasks 1.0.0
File	Size	Uploaded
django-user-tasks-1.0.0.tar.gz	25.0 kB	Mar 18, 2020	Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for django-user-tasks 1.0.0
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
django_user_tasks-1.0.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl 27.2 kB Mar 18, 2020	Python 3, Python 2	none	any	Details

Total release size: 52.2 kB

Release files / django-user-tasks-1.0.0.tar.gz

Download URL	django-user-tasks-1.0.0.tar.gz
Size	25.0 kB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`1f7deda6b277f60c1ee1d2f18852640dccef71796d38b513076992ff67788655`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`3b917da598e07162bc99bdc1b175238338bddd66929eecd734627be7e125069b`
Upload date	Mar 18, 2020
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/1.15.0 pkginfo/1.5.0.1 requests/2.23.0 setuptools/46.0.0 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 tqdm/4.43.0 CPython/3.5.6`

Release files / django_user_tasks-1.0.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	django_user_tasks-1.0.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Size	27.2 kB
Tags	Python 2 Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`0939db5a1abfc3ffaa936d21427d7706286e0b8b5371c63db8a4526e907be085`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`2287d47b393fee1ec2a8a70f0eb70792aab3cc491b7c5062d1028b72989ac71e`
Upload date	Mar 18, 2020
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/1.15.0 pkginfo/1.5.0.1 requests/2.23.0 setuptools/46.0.0 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 tqdm/4.43.0 CPython/3.5.6`