Writing your own link extension

To extend django-anylink lets assume you have a Download model. This model doesn’t have a get_absolute_url method. Theirfore you want to write your own link extension.

Lets have a look at the code first.

from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse

from anylink.extensions import BaseLink


class DownloadLink(BaseLink):
    def configure_model(self, model):
        # configure_model is called by django-anylink upon initialization.
        # We add a field to anylink model to keep the object reference.
        # Make sure the field is null-able, anylink will ensure its filled out
        # if the link type is set to DownloadLink.
        model.add_to_class(self.get_name(), models.ForeignKey(
            'myapp.Download', blank=True, null=True)

    def get_absolute_url(self, link):
        # Get the obj instance using the get_name method.
        obj = getattr(link, self.get_name())
        # return a reverse'd url or None if no obj is set.
        return obj and reverse('myurl', kwargs={'id': obj.pk}) or None

As you can see here, the Link extension has two important methods. The configure_model method and the get_absolute_url method. Please refer to the comments and the code for more details on this topic.