Recent objects using several Django models

I released a new Python package which builds on the excellent code published by Simon Willison in the blog post Building a combined stream of recent additions using the Django ORM. The rationale etc. for why this is useful is described much better by him and I’ll save everyone’s time by not repeating it in a worse way.

The new package is django-recent-objects, developed on GitHub and available from PyPI.

The package supports e.g. combining recent articles and comments in a single activity stream:

from testapp.models import Article, Comment
from recent_objects.recent_objects import RecentObjects

ro = RecentObjects(
    [
        {
            "queryset": Article.objects.all(),
            "date_field": "created_at",
        },
        {
            "queryset": Comment.objects.all(),
            "date_field": "created_at",
        },
    ]
)

additions = ro.page(paginate_by=10, page=1)

django-recent-objects adds the following features which aren’t available in the blogpost linked above:

• The name of the date_field doesn’t have to be the same for all objects
• Primary keys of different types are¹ supported
• The code uses a real paginator and doesn’t only support fetching the first few objects