Question

I am trying to create a web application as a front end to another Python app. I have the user enter data into a form, and upon submitting, the idea is for the data to be saved in a database, and for the data to be passed to a thread object class. The thread is something that is strictly kicked-off based on a user action. My problem is that I can import threading, but cannot access threading.Thread. When the thread ends, it will update the server, so when the user views the job information, they’ll see the results.

View:

@login_required(login_url='/login')
def createNetworkView(request):
    if request.method == "POST":
        # grab my variables from POST
        job = models.MyJob()
        # load my variables into MyJob object
        job.save()
        t = ProcessJobThread(job.id, my, various, POST, inputs, here)
        t.start()
        return HttpResponseRedirect("/viewJob?jobID=" + str(job.id))
    else:
        return HttpResponseRedirect("/")

My thread class:

import threading # this works
print "About to make thread object" # This works, I see this in the log
class CreateNetworkThread(threading.Thread): # failure here
    def __init__(self, jobid, blah1, blah2, blah3):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)

    def run(self):
        doCoolStuff()
        updateDB()

I get:

Exception Type: ImportError
Exception Value:    cannot import name Thread

However, if I run python on the command line, I can import threading and also do from threading import Thread. What’s the deal?

I have seen other things, like How to use thread in Django and Celery but that seemed overkill, and I don’t see how that example could import threading and use threading.Thread, when I can’t.
Thank you.

Edit: I’m using Django 1.4.1, Python 2.7.3, Ubuntu 12.10, SQLite for the DB, and I’m running the web application with ./manage.py runserver.

Answer 1

This was a silly issue I had. First, I had made a file called “threading.py” and someone suggest I delete it, which I did (or thought I did). The problem was because of me using Eclipse, the PyDev (Python) plugin for Eclipse only deleted the threading.py file I created, and hides the *.pyc file. I had a lingering threading.pyc file lingering around, even though PyDev has an option that I had enabled to delete orphaned .pyc files.