Django Integrity

Django Integrity contains tools for controlling deferred constraints and handling IntegrityErrors in Django projects which use PostgreSQL.

Deferrable constraints

Some PostgreSQL constraints can be defined as DEFERRABLE. A constraint that is not deferred will be checked immediately after every command. A deferred constraint check will be postponed until the end of the transaction. A deferrable constraint will default to either DEFERRED or IMMEDIATE.

The utilities in django_integrity.constraints can ensure a deferred constraint is checked immediately, or defer an immediate constraint.

These alter the state of constraints until the end of the current transaction:

• set_all_immediate(using=...)
• set_immedate(names=(...), using=...)
• set_deferred(names=(...), using=...)

To enforce a constraint immediately within some limited part of a transaction, use the immediate(names=(...), using=...) context manager.

Why do we need this?

This is most likely to be useful when you want to catch a foreign-key violation (i.e.: you have inserted a row which references different row which doesn't exist).

Django's foreign key constraints are deferred by default, so they would normally raise an error only at the end of a transaction. Using try to catch an IntegrityError from a foreign-key violation wouldn't work, and you'd need to wrap the COMMIT instead, which is trickier.

By making the constraint IMMEDIATE, the constraint would be checked on INSERT, and it would be much easier to catch.

More generally, if you have a custom deferrable constraint, it may be useful to change the default behaviour with these tools.

Refining IntegrityError

The refine_integrity_error context manager in django_integrity.conversion will convert an IntegrityError into a more specific exception based on a mapping of rules to your custom exceptions, and will raise the IntegrityError if it doesn't match.

Why do we need this?

When a database constraint is violated, we usually expect to see an IntegrityError.

Sometimes we need more information about the error: was it a unique constraint violation, or a check-constraint, or a not-null constraint? Perhaps we ran out of 32-bit integers for our ID column? Failing to be specific on these points could lead to bugs where we catch an exception without realising it was not the one we expected.

Example

from django_integrity import conversion
from users.models import User


class UserAlreadyExists(Exception): ...
class EmailCannotBeNull(Exception): ...
class EmailMustBeLowerCase(Exception): ...


def create_user(email: str) -> User:
    """
    Creates a user with the provided email address.

    Raises:
        UserAlreadyExists: If the email was not unique.
        EmailCannotBeNull: If the email was None.
        EmailMustBeLowerCase: If the email had a non-lowercase character.
    """
    rules = [
        (conversion.Unique(model=User, fields=("email",)), UserAlreadyExists),
        (conversion.NotNull(model=User, field="email"), EmailCannotBeNull),
        (conversion.Named(name="constraint_islowercase"), EmailMustBeLowerCase),
    ]
    with conversion.refine_integrity_error(rules):
        User.objects.create(email=email)

Supported dependencies

This package is tested against:

• Python 3.10, 3.11, or 3.12.
• Django 4.1, 4.2, or 5.0.
• PostgreSQL 12 to 16.
• psycopg2 and psycopg3.