Question

We are implementing the gamification component of a project in Django. We would like the superuser to be able to define new badges and redefine existing ones inside the Django admin interface.

The problem as we see it is that defining the sometimes complicated conditions for badges needs to be done in code. The superuser will be technically knowledgeable, but will not be a programmer.

How would you go about letting the superuser do this in the Django admin interface, rather than alter the application?

Here are some examples of badges:

• Created 10 tags that have been used on 10 questions by 10 different
  members.
• Answered 10 unanswered questions.
• Wrote 20 comments to a question (comments got at least 5 points each).

Answer 1

You don’t say if you expect the superuser to be a programmer or not.

If you can assume this then you could include Python code in a database field and use eval or exec to run it.

For example:

badge.function = """
def award_badge(user):
    return False
"""

vars = {}
exec(badge.function, vars)

if vars["award_badge"](user):
    ...

Clearly this has a lot of scope for abuse or mistakes, and certainly wouldn’t be suitable if you expect non-technical users to be creating badges.

Depending on the complexity of the rules you need to create you might be able to create rules engine for executing them. In this case you create a sort of mini-language where each step in the process of deciding whether to award a badge or not is specified by a row in the database. Rules engines are a complicated topic so I won’t go into detail here.

You’re probably better off hard coding the rules for badges in your code than using either of these suggestions.