Using Teams#

Teams are designed to provide sandboxes for groups of users collaborating on single project. Users can join one or more teams, invite other users to their teams, and give different team members different roles.

Pegasus provides the building blocks to setup a team-based application. Some of those building blocks are documented here.

Note: all of the following examples assume you have setup Pegasus with teams enabled.

Example App#

As of version 0.17, Pegasus ships with a built-in example application demonstrating the basics of working with team-based models and views.

The example app includes:

  1. A data model that belongs to a team.

  2. A set of class based views for working with that data model, limited to the context of a team.

Third party examples#

A Pegasus user Peter Cherna has created some more example applications that demonstrate additional team-based examples, including functional views, pagination, APIs and working with “global” objects.

They are a great place to start for inspiration and getting something up and running quickly!

Note: the example apps are not officially sanctioned/supported by Pegasus—though features from them will be continually incorporated into future releases.

Data Models#

Teams use three primary models - apps.users.CustomUser, apps.teams.Team, and apps.teams.Membership.

The Membership model uses Django’s “through” support to extend the User/Team relationship with additional fields.

By default, a role field is added to represent the User’s role in the Team (admin or member).

Team-based models#

Data models that “belong” to a Team can subclass BaseTeamModel. See the example app for usage.

Team-based Views#

At its core, all Team-based views need the following:

Urls#

See apps.team.urls for an example of how to set these up in your apps, and your main apps.{project}.urls file for how to add them to your site’s URLs.

Anything that goes into team_urlpatterns in apps.{project}.urls will automatically be added under the URL https://example.com/a/<team_slug>/. The team_slug is a human-readable, URL-friendly version of the team name that is auto-generated for you.

Middleware#

The apps.teams.middleware.TeamsMiddleware must be included in the list of middleware. It must be placed after django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware. The purpose of this middleware is to set request.team and request.team_membership based on the current request. It will attempt to load the team as follows:

  • From the team_slug in the request path if available

  • From the the current session if available

  • From the user’s list of teams if available

If the team_slug is available from the request path but it does not match a team that the user has access to then the request will terminate with a 404. Apart from this the middleware does not do any validation of the team or the team membership. That is left to the decorators described below.

Views#

See apps.team.views for example team views. All views that are referenced under team_urlpatterns must contain team_slug as the first argument.

In addition to adding this field, you will likely want to use one of the built-in permission decorators (see below) to ensure the logged-in user can access the selected team.

Additionally, you will have to scope any data model access to the relevant Team in any Database/ORM queries you make inside your views.

Permission Control#

Pegasus includes two convenience decorators for use in team views. These can be found in apps.teams.decorators.

The login_and_team_required decorator#

This decorator can be used to ensure that the logged in user has access to the team in the view. It requires your view takes in a team_slug, as in the example views. It can be used in functional views like this:

@login_and_team_required
def a_team_view(request, team_slug):
    # other view logic here
    return render(request, 'web/my_template.html', context={
        'team': request.team,
    })

Or in class-based views like this:

@method_decorator(login_and_team_required, name='dispatch')
class ATeamView(View):
    # other view details go here

If the current user does not have access to the team they will see a 404 page. If no user is logged in they’ll be redirected to a login view, just like the login_required decorator.

The team_admin_required decorator#

The team_admin_required decorator works just like the login_and_team_required decorator, except in addition to checking team membership the role is also checked and if the user doesn’t have “admin” access they will not be able to access the view.

The LoginAndTeamRequiredMixin and TeamAdminRequiredMixin classes#

These mixins provide the same functionality as the decorators, but are designed to work with Django’s generic class-based views. They can be used like this:

class ATeamModelListView(LoginAndTeamRequiredMixin, ListView):
    model = MyModel

See the example app for more details.

Template tags#

In addition to the decorators, you can also use template tags to check user / team access from a template.

This can be useful for hiding/showing certain content based on a user’s team role. The is_member_of filter can be used to check team membership, and the is_admin_of filter can be used to check if a user is a team admin. For example, the following will show only if the logged in user is an admin of the associated team:

{% load team_tags %}
{% if team and request.user|is_admin_of:team %}
  <p>You're an admin of {{team.name}}.</p>
{% elif team and request.user|is_member_of:team %}
  <p>You're a member of {{team.name}}.</p>
{% else %}
  <p>Sorry you don't have access to {{team.name}}.</p>
{% endif %}