Question

My old worker installed Pinax through PIP and it’s installed in site-packages. All the apps lives there. Our own apps are within our Django project structure.

I want to modify Pinax’s account app, by switching the create_user‘s is_active flag to False. Currently, the app makes it True. I also want to add additional functionality to create_user or whatever function I want to do.

from pinax.account import forms
class MyCustomizeForm(forms.SignupForm):
   def create_user(....):
      super(....)
      // additional...

Maybe this?
But doesn’t that require me to do at least two commit transactions talking to DB?

Is that preferable? Also, does doing this require me to change anything else in my Django project (how users signup, what views it uses… what forms it uses)?

Currently, I’ve an app living in my Django project supposes to deal with the extension / customization of account app. I can’t commit site-packages to VCS…. I mean.. I am not supposed to make any changes there.

Thanks.

---

Pinax account/models.py

class Account(models.Model):
    ...
    def its_own_method(...)
# this is in the same indentation level as class Account

def create_account(sender, instance=None, **kwargs):
    if instance is None:
        return
    account, created = Account.objects.get_or_create(user=instance)

post_save.connect(create_account, sender=User)

Answer 1

You can use the django signals for exactly this situation. Signals are meant for apps that need to be distributed generally and won’t always know how they will be integrated into a project.

The signal of interest to you here is the pre_save. You can connect a pre_save to the pinax.account model and be notified when a save is about to happen. This will give you a chance to make changes to that model instance. Signals are synchronous, meaning you are making your change serially, right before the pinax.accounts will finish committing the save