Behaviors

Extensible behavior functions

This module allows one app to define a “behavior function”, which other apps can then override to change the behavior. This is the Chain of responsibility pattern which helps keep modules loosely coupled.

A typical use for this is the subtitle that we display for video cards, underneath the title. Normally, we don’t show anything there, but for TED we show the speaker name. Putting the code that deals with this inside the videos app is bad practice because:

• It’s adding complexity to the videos app. Handling team requirements is outside of its scope.
• It requires importing from the teams app, but the teams app needs to import from the videos app. So we now have a circular dependency.

Instead, videos defines the get_video_subtitle behavior, which can then be overriden by other apps. This allows us to change the behavior without having to add complexity/dependencies to the videos app. The code works something like this.

Example

>>> @behavior
... def get_video_subtitle(video)
...     return video.title
>>> @get_video_subtitle.override
... def get_video_subtitle_for_team_foo(video):
...     team_video = video.get_team_video()
...     if team_video and team_video.slug == 'foo'
...         return 'My Team: %s' % video.title
...     else:
...         return DONT_OVERRIDE