I found my self doing data migration for a client, and also found that their old system (CSV) had 4 text fields that were 2 to 4MB each and after about 2 minutes of hammering the mysql server as I was parsing this and trying to insert the data the server would drop all connections. In my testing I found that if I didnt send those 4 fields the mysql server was happy to let me migrate all my data all (240GB of it). So I started thinking, "I should just store these fields compress anyways, a little over head to render the data, but thats fine by me."
So thus was born a CompressedTextField. It bz2 compresses the contents then does a base64 encode to play nice with the server storage of text fields. Once I started using this my data migration, though a bit slower then without the field data, ran along all happy.
- text
- model
- field
- compress
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I keep finding places in my apps where I need an isolated snippet of text that can periodically be changed from the admin interface. Most often it's html but sometimes it's text, javascript, or css.
Use it like so:
(Assuming this snippet lives in snippy_snip/models.py and there is a snippet named "Welcome Message" in the database)
from snippy_snip.models import snip
msg = snip("Welcome Message")
Or, you might populate a parameter hash for a template:
def showpage(request):
params = {
'welcome': snip('Welcome Message'),
'video1': snip('Video 1'),
'NavHeader': snip('Nav.SectionHeader'),
}
return render_to_response("main.html", params)
For clarity, *params* might look something like this:
welcome -> "Welcome to our site. Please use the menu on the left..."
video1 - > a YouTube snippet
NavHeader -> Some HTML which comprises the top of a navigation menu.
This is a very simple bit of code but I've found it very useful. It isn't intended for instant changes... Your snippets will cache like anything else, which may cause confusion if you expect immediate changes. And it's probably not great for a high traffic site, but for my moderate traffic sites and workgroup apps I've found it useful.
(This code was created for 0.96, but I'm working to bring it into alignment with the latest svn version of Django, see comments.)
- text
- javascript
- html
- snippet