Question

I have an application that splits models into different files.

Actually the folder looks like :

>myapp
    __init__.py
    models.py
    >hooks
        ...
    ...

myapp don’t care about what’s in the hooks, folder, except that there are models, and that they have to be imported somehow, and installed by syncdb. So, I put this in myapp.__init__.py :

from django.conf import settings

for hook in settings.HOOKS :
    try :
        __import__(hook)
    except ImportError as e :
        print "Got import err !", e
#where settings.HOOKS = ("myapp.hooks.a_super_hook1", ...) 

In order for this code to work, the models in hooks have

class Meta:
    app_label="my_app"

The problem is that it doesn’t work when I run syncdb.

So I tried successively :

1)

for hook in settings.HOOKS :
    try :
        exec ("from %s import *" % hook)

-> doesn’t work either : syncdb doesn’t install the models in hooks

2)

from myapp.hooks.a_super_hook1 import *

-> This works

3)

exec("from myapp.hooks.a_super_hook1 import *")

-> This works to

So I checked that in the test 1), the statement executed is the same than in tests 2) and 3), and it is exactly the same …

Any idea ???

EDIT :
The question could be summarized to :

I declared models outside of “models.py”, where to put MY import code, so that syncdb finds the models ?

Answer 1

Ok … I’ve got the damn thing.

When importing models, syncdb tries to import what it finds. If the import fails, then it is post-poned to be tried later ! That’s why :

for hook in settings.HOOKS :
    try :
        __import__(hook)
    except ImportError as e :
        print "Got import err !", e

doesn’t work with syncdb : because the import error is caught, and not transmitted, then the models import will never be post-poned. So right code to do this is simply :

for log_hook in settings.LOG_HOOKS :
    try :
        __import__(log_hook)
    except ImportError as e :
        raise e

The try... except is probably useless in this case.