Proxyid

Proxyid hides your Django model primary key

Proxyid turns https://myapp.com/model/1 into https://myapp.com/model/5NxJD1dG6V

It makes use of the hashids library to mask your integer or uuid based primary keys. It's plug'n play, therefore, it doesn't interfere with the database or model definitions.

Quick Start

Assuming a Django project is already set with an app called appmock, proxyid can be installed with pip.

$ pip install proxyid

The configuration is set as a constant PROXYID in settings.py

PROXYID = {
    "hashids": {
        "salt": "A grain of salt", # this is your salt
        "min_length": 15           # this is the minimum length of the proxied id
    }
}

Let's say the project has an Author model

# djangoproject/appmock/models.py
from django.db import models

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField()
    nationality = models.CharField()

    def __str__(self):
        return self.name

Now take a look at our urls.py

# djangoproject/appmock/urls.py
from django.urls import path
from appmock import views


urlpatterns = [
    # ...other path configuration
    # ...other path configuration
    # ...other path configuration
    path("author/<pk>/", views.author_detail, name="author-detail")
]

Proxify the Primary Key

If the app is exposing the database's primary key, the Author resource would be found, for example, at http://myapp.com/author/1 Let's hide our primary key. by importing the proxify decorator and defining a property method.

# djangoproject/appmock/models.py
from django.db import models
from proxyid.decorators import proxify

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField()
    nationality = models.CharField()

    @property
    @proxify
    def id_(self): pass

    def __str__(self):
        return self.name

That's it, now our model instance will have the id_ property with it's unique primary key encoded by proxyid by using the hashids library. All we need is a method which doesn't return anything and the decorators @property and @proxify. You can name this property method whatever you want(except pk or id), let's name it id_ for this example.

Let's check it by retrieving a model in a django shell session

$ python manage.py shell
Python 3.9.2 (default, Mar 21 2021, 20:35:03)
[GCC 9.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
(InteractiveConsole)
>>> from appmock import models
>>> author = models.Author.object.create(name="Lima Barreto", nationality="Brazil")
>>> author.id
1
>>> author.id_
RvBykxK6qojOJnOMrQeGpALDW

Retrieving objects from encoded Primary Keys

Now, how about retrieving our object from the database if our user is giving us the encoded(RvBykxK6qojOJnOMrQeGpALDW) primary key? Let's go to our hypothetical author_detail view function in views.py

# djangoprojects/appmock/views.py
from django.shortcuts import render, HttpResponse

from appmock.models import Author

from proxyid.encoding import decode

# ...other code

def author_detail(request, pk):
    decoded_pk = decode(pk) # this will bring RvBykxK6qojOJnOMrQeGpALDW back to 1
    author = Author.objects.get(pk=decoded_pk)
    context = {"author" : author}
    return render(request, "appmock/author_detail.html", context)

We imported decode from proxyid.encoding, the decode function will transform our proxied value back to it's original primary key value, allowing us to retrieve our object by giving the pk value to the ORM.

How the urls were generated? By just passing the object id_ instead of pk property or whatever name you have it to the url function. Like this:

<!-- some html -->

{% url 'author-detail' author.id_ %}

Now our author resource can be found at http:myapp.com/author/RvBykxK6qojOJnOMrQeGpALDW

What about class based views?

Let's build the same logic of author_detail function view as a class based view now:

# djangoproject/appmock/views.py
from django.views import generic

from appmock.models import Author

from proxyid.mixins import ProxyidMixin

class AuthorDetailView(ProxyidMixin, generic.DetailView):
    template_name = "appmock/author_detail.html"
    model = Author
    context_object_name = "author"

That's it, the view will work the same way as long as you use the ProxyidMixin as a parent class, and don't forget to provide a pk argument(this can be customized) from the url dispatcher.