Question

In Django, what does it mean to generate an action in a separate signal?

For example, is this documentation here: https://github.com/brantyoung/django-notifications

It states: Generating notifications is probably best done in a separate signal.

Answer 1

In the documentation you mentioned, there are two signals used by the example. The first one is notifications.notify and the other one is django.db.models.signals.post_save.

In order to use the notification app, basically you only need the first signal. For example, anywhere in your code you can write:

notify.send(request.user, verb='reached level 10')

However, the writer suggest that you should emit the notify signal after (or when) you handle another signal. Hence the example below:

def my_handler(sender, instance, created, **kwargs):
    #other routines here
    notify.send(instance, verb='was saved')

post_save.connect(my_handler, sender=MyModel)

That is, you send the notify signal as a part of the post_save signal handler.