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An application for managing your organization's authorities (departments, directorates etc)

Project description

An application for managing your organization’s authorities (departments, directorates etc). This is an app built to mainly cover the needs of the organization I work for (a public sector organization in Greece); however feel free to use it if you like it.

Rationale

This more or less is a better auth.Group to help you building the hierarchy of an organization. Why not just use auth.Group? Well, unfortunately, auth.Group is missing various needed things like:

  • category: You may have departments, teams, directoratates

  • active: Some authorities are de-activated; they should not be deleted though

  • parent: You’ll need to have a proper authority hierarchy

  • email: Some authorities have their own email for contact

Also, for me the django auth.Group entity feels more like an application/system-related concept (vs the HR Authority provided in this add-on). I.e you can have a django auth group of “Administrators” or “Advanced users” or “Moderators” etc; these people may belong to various directorates; not all people in the “IT department” need to be Administrators of the application.

Now, there are more things that may be useful for an authority/HR system, like

  • manager: Who manages the authority

  • user-job: The users of an authority may have different jobs like manager (this is complementary to the first one), teller, client development etc

I haven’t added these fields yet because I don’t need them for my projects. If the need arises I’ll add them.

Installation

Install it with pip install django-authorities, or if you want to use the latest version on github, try pip install git+https://github.com/spapas/django-authorities.

After it is installed, put authorities in your INSTALLED_APPS setting.

Simple usage

This is a very simple app with two models and a couple of views for editing these.

After you’ve installed it, you can visit the django admin to edit authorities.Authority and authorities.AuthorityKind. AuthorityKind only has a name (so it can be directorate, department team etc) while Authority has kind (AuthorityKind), is_active (boolean), parent (an optional FK to another Authority to create hierarchies) and users (an M2M relation with settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL; each user can belong to multiple authorities and each authority will have more than one user).

Also I’ve included a couple of non-admin views which you can use as they are or modify them to fit your needs. Either inherit from or and them in your own urls.py as they are or include the whole authorities.urls. The templates of these views inherit from a base.html which needs to provide a content and a {% page_title %} block. Thus your base.html template could be like this:

<html>
    <body>
        <h1>{% block page_title %}{% endblock %}</h1>
        {% block content %}{% endblock %}
    </body>
</html>

These views are:

  • authorities.views.AuthorityListView

  • authorities.views.AuthorityCreateView

  • authorities.views.AuthorityUpdateView

  • authorities.views.AuthorityDetailView

  • authorities.views.AuthorityEditUsersView

The names are self-explanatory; notice that the Create and Update views do not allow you to edit the users of that authority; you must use the AuthorityEditUsersView for that.

You can either use these views in your urls.py or just add something like path("authorities/", include("authorities.urls")), in your urls.py.

To improve security a bit I’m checking that a user has the proper permission for authority in the app’s urls.py before allowing access to these views, i.e authorities.view_authority for list and view, authorities.add_authority for add and authorities.change_authority for edit and edit users.

To use the provided template tag, you need to {% load authorities_tags %} and then you can do something like this in your template:

{% if user.is_authenticated %}
    {% user_authorities as my_authorities %}
    {% if my_authorities %}
        My authorities are:
        <ul>
        {% for a in my_authorities  %}
            <li>{{ a.name }}</li>
        {% endfor %}
        </ul>
    {% endif %}
{% endif %}

Configuration

The follow options are supported:

  • AUTHORITY_STR_FUNCTION: You can use this option to set a function that will be used instead of the default __str__ function of the Authority model

  • AUTHORITY_KIND_STR_FUNCTION: You can use this option to set a function that will be used instead of the default __str__ of the AuthorityKind

Both functions will take the object as a parameter. For example define a function named authority_str in your project.core.utils module like this:

def authority_str(au):
    return '{0} {1}'.format(au.name, au.email)

And then in your settings.py add: AUTHORITY_STR_FUNCTION = project.core.utils.authority_str

Changelog

v.0.4.2

Make unique per name/kind id

v.0.4.1

Make it compatible with Django 4.x

v.0.4.0

Support configurable __str__ methods for Authority and AuthorityKind

v.0.3.3

  • Add a default default_auto_field to apps.py

v.0.3.2

  • Small fix to work with newer Django versions

v.0.3.1

  • Add email to forms

v.0.3.0

  • Add optional email field to Authority

v.0.2.3

  • Improve permissions

v.0.2.2

  • Fix MANIFEST.in to include locale files

v.0.2.1

  • Add a missing migration

v.0.2.0

  • Add greek translations

  • Improve standard views a bit

  • Add some security to the builtin views

v.0.1.2

  • Add template tags to get current user authorities

  • Improve README

v.0.1.0

  • Initial version

Project details


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