Using Events

An event is an object broadcast by the repoze.bfg framework at interesting points during the lifetime of an application. You don’t need to use events in order to create most repoze.bfg applications, but they can be useful when you want to perform slightly advanced operations. For example, subscribing to an event can allow you to run some code as the result of every new request.

Events in repoze.bfg are always broadcast by the framework. However, they only become useful when you register a subscriber. A subscriber is a function that accepts a single argument named event:

def mysubscriber(event):
    print event

The above is a subscriber that simply prints the event to the console when it’s called.

The mere existence of a subscriber function, however, is not sufficient to arrange for it to be called. To arrange for the subscriber to be called, you’ll need to use the repoze.bfg.configurator.Configurator.add_subscriber() method to register the subscriber imperatively, or you’ll need to use ZCML for the same purpose:

Configuring an Event Listener Imperatively

You can imperatively configure a subscriber function to be called for some event type via the repoze.bfg.configuration.Configurator.add_subscriber() method (see also Configurator):

from repoze.bfg.interfaces import INewRequest

from subscribers import mysubscriber

# "config" below is assumed to be an instance of a
# repoze.bfg.configuration.Configurator object

config.add_subscriber(mysubscriber, INewRequest)

The first argument to repoze.bfg.configuration.Configurator.add_subscriber() is the subscriber function; the second argument is the event type.

Configuring an Event Listener Through ZCML

You can configure an event listener by modifying your application’s configure.zcml. Here’s an example of a bit of XML you can add to the configure.zcml file which registers the above mysubscriber function, which we assume lives in a subscribers.py module within your application:

<subscriber
   for="repoze.bfg.interfaces.INewRequest"
   handler=".subscribers.mysubscriber"
 />

See also subscriber.

Either of the above registration examples implies that every time the repoze.bfg framework emits an event object that supplies an repoze.bfg.interfaces.INewRequest interface, the mysubscriber function will be called with an event object.

As you can see, a subscription is made in terms of an interface. The event object sent to a subscriber will always be an object that possesses an interface. The interface itself provides documentation of what attributes of the event are available.

The return value of a subscriber function is ignored. Subscribers to the same event type are not guaranteed to be called in any particular order relative to each other.

All the concrete repoze.bfg event types are documented in the repoze.bfg.events API documentation.

An Example

If you create event listener functions in a subscribers.py file in your application like so:

def handle_new_request(event):
    print 'request', event.request

def handle_new_response(event):
    print 'response', event.response

You may configure these functions to be called at the appropriate times by adding the following ZCML to your application’s configure.zcml file:

<subscriber
   for="repoze.bfg.interfaces.INewRequest"
   handler=".subscribers.handle_new_request"
 />

<subscriber
   for="repoze.bfg.interfaces.INewResponse"
   handler=".subscribers.handle_new_response"
 />

If you’re not using ZCML, the repoze.bfg.configuration.Configurator.add_subscriber() method can alternately be used to perform the same job:

from repoze.bfg.interfaces import INewRequest
from repoze.bfg.interfaces import INewResponse

from subscribers import handle_new_request
from subscribers import handle_new_response

# "config" below is assumed to be an instance of a
# repoze.bfg.configuration.Configurator object

config.add_subscriber(handle_new_request, INewRequest)
config.add_subscriber(handle_new_response, INewResponse)

Either mechanism causes the functions in subscribers.py to be registered as event subscribers. Under this configuration, when the application is run, each time a new request or response is detected, a message will be printed to the console.

Each of our subscriber functions accepts an event object and prints an attribute of the event object. This begs the question: how can we know which attributes a particular event has?

We know that repoze.bfg.interfaces.INewRequest event objects have a request attribute, which is a request object, because the interface defined at repoze.bfg.interfaces.INewRequest says it must. Likewise, we know that repoze.bfg.interfaces.INewResponse events have a response attribute, which is a response object constructed by your application, because the interface defined at repoze.bfg.interfaces.INewResponse says it must.