Question

In my django app I am writing a custom management command which will create an instance of an object based on the args passed and have the option of saving it to the database based on whether an option --save is passed or not.

I’ve got a lot of help on this from the django documentation itself. Have also got important pointers from here about how to pass multiple arguments and here about how to have options.

from optparse import make_option

class Command(BaseCommand):
  option_list = BaseCommand.option_list + (
    make_option('--delete',
        action='store_true',
        dest='delete',
        default=False,
        help='Delete poll instead of closing it'),
    )

  def handle(self, *args, **options):
    # ...
    if options['delete']:
        poll.delete()
    # ...

However I am not able to find a detailed explanation of the fields in make_option. For example optparse.make_option lists

Instance attributes:
_short_opts : [string]
_long_opts : [string]

action : string
type : string
dest : string
default : any
nargs : int
const : any
choices : [string]
callback : function
callback_args : (any*)
callback_kwargs : { string : any }
help : string
metavar : string

In this help is self explanatory and I figured out what dest would mean, but I’m not clear what action='store_true' means. In fact it’d be great if someone could give me a short description of what all the arguments to make_option mean…

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

The optparse docs might be a little bit more helpful. You are basically telling the management function what each option you require should do.

The action keyword is the most telling and it configures what you want to do with that option – is it just a flag to do something special (a callback, i.e. ‘–enable-feature’) or should it accept a parameter for example (store, i.e. ‘-things 10’).

With that in mind, the rest of the options make a bit more sense with that all in mind. Read through ‘option attributes’ to get an explanation of what you’ve listed, and then ‘actions’ to see what I’ve mentioned above