Django Validation Report

Django Validation Report (DVR) allows you to control whether all model instances can be resaved without errors.

Suppose you have a Model:

class Person(models.Model):
    is_monastic = models.BooleanField()
    monastic_name = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=True)

Later on, after there are already some Person objects in the database, you add a clean method to the model:

    def clean(self):
        if self.is_monastic and not self.monastic_name:
            raise ValidationError(
                "If a Person is monastic, 'monastic_name' must be specified")

Now, it would be nice to control whether the old Person objects meet new standards. Otherwise unexpected ValidationErrors might be risen if the old ones are being resaved.

Django Validation Report offers a solution to this problem.

Features

DVR provides:

1. a report view for logged in users
2. a manage.py command to show the report on the console
3. automatic report email sending to admins; this is designed to be addded to your CI/CD script

Requirements

• Python 3
• Django 2 (should aslo work with previous versions, but it hasn't been tested. See issue #1)

Installation

Install using pip:

pip install django-validation-report

Then add validation_report to your INSTALLED_APPS.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'validation_report.apps.ValidationReportConfig',
]

To your main urls.py add:

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    path('validation-report/', include('validation_report.urls')),
]

Also make sure you have specified LOGIN_URL in your settings.py. In order to see the generated report, the user must be logged in. If you do not have a custom login page, you can just use the default admin login page LOGIN_URL = '/admin/login/'.

The emails are sent to settings.ADMINS, so check that this constant has been specified and email sending has been configured.

Usage

View

Go to /validation-report/ URL. As a logged in user, you should see something like this:

Validation report

Run full_clean() for all Django model instances and return a report regarding failures.

Validating 'Person' with id '1' raised [ValidationError(["If a Person is monastic, 'monastic_name' must be specified"])]
Validating 'Person' with id '3' raised [ValidationError(["If a Person is monastic, 'monastic_name' must be specified"])]

Task completed, 2  errors detected

If an error occurred and the server stopped delivering the StreamingHttpResponse before all model instances were checked, an error message will be shown:

Validation report

Run full_clean() for all Django model instances and return a report regarding failures.

Validating 'Person' with id '1' raised [ValidationError(["If a Person is monastic, 'monastic_name' must be specified"])]

ERROR: Task was not completed, server response was interrupted.

Manage.py command

Type

$ ./manage.py validationreport

The given report is similar to the one returned by the view in the previous chapter.

Email sending

Type

$ ./manage.py validationreport --sendmail

You should see something like this:

Run `full_clean()` for all Django model instances and return a report regarding failures.
Validating 'Person' with id '1' raised [ValidationError(["If a Person is monastic, 'monastic_name' must be specified"])]
Validating 'Person' with id '3' raised [ValidationError(["If a Person is monastic, 'monastic_name' must be specified"])]
Task completed, 2  errors detected

The report was sent to the following addresses:
abbot@monastery.eu

This command is especially useful for adding to your CI/CD script, so you will be notified on time and all possible confusion can be avoided.

License

DVR is published under MIT license.

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