Oscar 1.0 release notes

release

2014-11-07

Welcome to Oscar 1.0! It’s been 7 months and some 800 commits since 0.7 and lots of work has gone into 1.0. This release makes quite a few changes, especially around supporting Django 1.7 with its app refactor and new migrations support.

Also, as you might have seen, the repositories for Oscar and most of its extensions have moved to a new Github organisation. This marks a change for Oscar from being a Tangent-sponsored project to a more community-driven one, similar to Django itself. The core team is growing too to accommodate new contributors from outside Tangent. This is an exciting change and we’re hopeful that Oscar can continue to grow and prosper. To mark this departure, this release has been renamed from 0.8 (under which we released three beta versions) to 1.0.

Table of contents:

Compatibility

This release adds support for Django 1.7. Per our policy of always supporting two versions of Django, support for Django 1.5 has been dropped.

This release also adds full Python 3.3 and 3.4 support.

If you’re using pysolr for search, you’ll need to upgrade to version 3.2 or later.

What’s new in Oscar 1.0?

Explicit differentiation of child, parent and stand-alone products

In some edge cases, it was difficult to determine the ‘type’ of a product. For example, whether a product is a parent (or “group”) product without children or stand-alone product (which never has children). To make that distinction easier, a structure field has been introduced on the AbstractProduct class. In that process, naming for the three different product structures has been altered to be:

stand-alone product

A regular product (like a book)

parent product

A product that represents a set of child products (e.g. a T-shirt, where the set is the various colour and size permutations). These were previously referred to as “group” products.

child product

All child products have a parent product. They’re a specific version of the parent. Previously known as product variant.

Some properties and method names have also been updated to the new naming. The old ones will throw a deprecation warning.

Better handling of child products in product dashboard

Together with the changes above, the dashboard experience for child products has been improved. The difference between a parent product and a stand-alone product is hidden from the user; a user can now add and remove child products on any suitable product. When the first child product is added, a stand-alone product becomes a parent product; and vice versa.

In the front-end, the old name of “product variants” has been kept.

Customisation just got easier!

  • Oscar’s views are now dynamically imported. This means that they can be overridden like most other classes in Oscar; overriding the related Application instance is not necessary any more which simplifies the process of replacing or customising a view.

  • A new management command, oscar_fork_app, has been introduced to make it easy to fork an Oscar app in order to override one of its classes.

The documentation around Customising Oscar has been given an overhaul to incorporate the changes.

Django 1.7 support

Oscar 1.0 comes with support for Django 1.7 out of the box. The app refactor and the new migration framework are both great improvements to Django. Oscar now ships with sets of migrations both for South and the new native migrations framework.

Unfortunately, the changes in Django required a few breaking changes when upgrading Oscar both for users staying on Django 1.6 and for users upgrading to Django 1.7 at the same time. These are detailed in the section for backwards-incompatible changes.

The changes in Django 1.7 meant quite a bit of effort to support both versions of Django, so it’s very probable that Django 1.6 support will be removed in the next release of Oscar. Django 1.7 has notable improvements, so with that in mind, we can only recommend upgrading now.

Billing addresses explicitly passed around checkout

The build_submission method used in checkout now has a billing_address key and the signatures for the submit and handle_order_placement methods have been extended to include it as a keyword argument. While this change should be backwards compatible, it’s worth being aware of the method signature changes in case it affects your checkout implementation.

Dashboard for weight-based shipping methods

There is a new dashboard for weight-based shipping methods. It isn’t enabled by default as weight-based shipping methods are themselves not enabled by default. To add it to the dashboard menu, include this snippet in your OSCAR_DASHBOARD_NAVIGATION setting:

OSCAR_DASHBOARD_NAVIGATION = [
    ...
    {
        'label': _('Shipping charges'),
        'url_name': 'dashboard:shipping-method-list',
    },
    ...
]

You’ll also need to modify your shipping repository class to return weight-based shipping methods.

US demo site

To help developers building sites for the US, a new example Oscar site has been included in the repository. This customises core Oscar to treat all prices as excluding tax and then calculate and apply taxes once the shipping address is known.

Faceting for category browsing

If Oscar is running with a Solr-powered search backend, the category browsing now shows facets (e.g. filter by price range, or product type). This is implemented via a new SearchHandler interface, which will eventually replace the tight coupling between Haystack and Oscar. It therefore paves the way for better support for other search engines.

Reworked shipping app

Several parts of the shipping app have been altered. The most important change is a change to the API of shipping methods to avoid a potential thread safety issue. Any existing Oscar sites with custom shipping methods will need to adjust them to confirm to the new API. The new API and the other changes are detailed below.

See the backwards incompatible changes for the shipping app and the guide to configuring shipping for more information.

Basket additions clean-up

The forms and views around adding things to your basket have been vigorously reworked. This cleans up some very old code there and ensures variant products are handled in a consistent way.

The changes do require changing the constructor signature of the AddToBasketForm - the details are documented in the Basket app changes.

Checkout improvements

The checkout process now skips payment if the order total is zero (e.g. when ordering free products or using a voucher). As part of that, checkout views now evaluate pre-conditions (as before) and newly introduced skip conditions. This should make customising the checkout flow easier.

Out with the old, in with the new

Lots of methods deprecated in the 0.6 release have now been removed. Specifically, the partner “wrapper” functionality is now gone. All price and availability logic now needs to be handled with strategies.

Minor changes

  • The OSCAR_CURRENCY_LOCALE setting has been removed. The locale is now automatically determined from the current language. This ensures prices are always shown in the correct format when switching languages.

  • The login and registration view now redirects staff users to the dashboard after logging in. It also employs flash messages to welcome returning and newly registered users.

  • The basket middleware now assigns a basket_hash attribute to the request instance. This provides a hook for basket caching.

  • The tracking pixel now also reports the Oscar version in use. This was forgotten when adding tracking of the Python and Django version in 0.7. Total information collected now is the versions of Django, Python and Oscar.

  • The tracking pixel is now served by a server run by the new Oscar organisation, rather than by Tangent.

  • The OSCAR_SLUG_FUNCTION now accepts both string notation and a callable.

  • The default templates now allow the order status to be changed on the dashboard order detail page.

  • The forms for the order dashboard views are now loaded dynamically so they can be overridden.

  • An OSCAR_DELETE_IMAGE_FILES setting has been introduced which makes deleting image files and thumbnails after deleting a model with an ImageField optional. It usually is desired behaviour, but can slow down an app when using a remote storage.

  • Oscar now ships with a oscar_populate_countries management command to populate the country databases. It replaces the countries.json fixture. The command relies on the pycountry library being installed.

  • It is now possible to use product attributes to add a relation to arbitrary model instances. There was some (presumably broken) support for it before, but you should now be able to use product attributes of type entity as expected. There’s currently no frontend or dashboard support for it, as there is no good default behaviour.

  • Payment extensions can now raise a UserCancelled payment exception to differentiate between the intended user action and any other errors.

  • Oscar has a new dependency, django-tables2. It’s a handy library that helps when displaying tabular data, allowing sorting, etc. It also makes it easier to adapt e.g. the product list view in the dashboard to additional fields.

  • jquery-ui-datepicker has been replaced in the dashboard by bootstrap-datetimepicker. We still ship with jquery-ui-datepicker and JQuery UI as it’s in use in the frontend.

  • … and dozens of bugs fixed!

Backwards incompatible changes in 1.0

Product structure

Generally, backwards compatibility has been preserved. Be aware of the following points though:

  • You now need to explicitly set product structure when creating a product; the default is a stand-alone product.

  • The related_name for child products was altered from variants to children. A variants property has been provided (and will throw a deprecation warning), but if you used the old related name in a query lookup (e.g. products.filter(variants__title='foo'), you will have to change it to children.

  • Template blocks and CSS classes have been renamed.

The following methods and properties have been deprecated:

  • Product.is_parent - Use is_group instead.

  • Product.is_variant - Use is_child instead.

  • Product.is_top_level - Test for is_standalone and/or is_parent instead.

  • Strategy.fetch_for_group - Use fetch_for_parent instead.

  • Strategy.group_[pricing|availability]_policy - Use parent_[pricing|availability]_policy instead.

  • Strategy.select_variant_stockrecords - Use select_children_stockrecords instead.

Furthermore, CSS classes and template blocks have been updated. Please follow the following renaming pattern:

  • variant-product becomes child-product

  • product_variants becomes child_products

  • variants becomes children

  • variant becomes child

Product editing

The dashboard improvements for child products meant slight changes to both ProductCreateUpdateView and ProductForm. Notably ProductForm now gets a parent kwarg. Please review your customisations for compatibility with the updated code.

Shipping

The shipping method API has been altered to avoid potential thread-safety issues. Prior to v1.0, shipping methods had a set_basket method which allowed a basket instance to be assigned. This was really a crutch to allow templates to have easy access to shipping charges (as they could be read straight off the shipping method instance). However, it was also a design problem as shipping methods could be instantiated at compile-time leading to a thread safety issue where multiple threads could assign a basket to the same shipping method instance.

In Oscar 1.0, shipping methods are stateless services that have a method calculate() that takes a basket and returns a Price instance. New template tags are provided that allow these shipping charges to be accessed from templates.

This API change does require quite a few changes as both the shipping method and shipping charge now need to be passed around separately:

  • Shipping methods no longer have charge_excl_tax, charge_incl_tax and is_tax_known properties.

  • The OrderCreator class now requires the shipping_charge to be passed to place_order.

  • The signature of the OrderTotalCalculator class has changed to accept shipping_charge rather than a shipping_method instance.

  • The signature of the get_order_totals() method has changed to accept the shipping_charge rather than a shipping_method instance.

Another key change is in the shipping repository object. The get_shipping_methods method has been split in two to simplify the exercise of providing new shipping methods. The best practice for Oscar 1.0 is to override the methods attribute if the same set of shipping methods is available to everyone:

from oscar.apps.shipping import repository, methods

class Standard(methods.FixedPrice):
    code = "standard"
    name = "Standard"
    charge_excl_tax = D('10.00')


class Express(methods.FixedPrice):
    code = "express"
    name = "Express"
    charge_excl_tax = D('20.00')

class Repository(repository.Repository):
    methods = [Standard(), Express()]

or to override get_available_shipping_methods if the available shipping methods if only available conditionally:

from oscar.apps.shipping import repository

class Repository(repository.Repository):

    def get_available_shipping_methods(
            self, basket, shipping_addr=None, **kwargs):
        methods = [Standard()]
        if shipping_addr.country.code == 'US':
            # Express only available in the US
            methods.append(Express())
        return methods

Note that shipping address should be passed around as instances not classes.

Email address handling

In theory, the local part of an email is case-sensitive. In practice, many users don’t know about this and most email servers don’t consider the capitalisation. Because of this, Oscar now disregards capitalisation when looking up emails (e.g. when a user logs in). Storing behaviour is unaltered: When a user’s email address is stored (e.g. when registering or checking out), the local part is unaltered and the host portion is lowercased.

Warning

Those changes mean you might now have multiple users with email addresses that Oscar considers identical. Please use the new oscar_find_duplicate_emails management command to check your database and deal with any conflicts accordingly.

Django 1.7 support

If you have any plans to upgrade to Django 1.7, more changes beyond addressing migrations are necessary:

  • You should be aware that Django 1.7 now enforces uniqueness of app labels. Oscar dashboard apps now ship with an AppConfig that set their app label to {oldname}_dashboard.

  • If you have forked any Oscar apps, you must add an AppConfig to them, and have them inherit from the Oscar one. See the appropriate section in Forking an app for an example.

  • Double-check that you address migrations as detailed below.

  • Django now enforces that no calls happen to the model registry during app startup. This mostly means that you should avoid module-level calls to get_model, as that only works with a fully initialised model registry.

Basket line stockrecords

The basket line model got a reference to the stockrecord in Oscar 0.6. The basket middleware since then updated basket lines to have stockrecords if one was missing. If any lines are still missing a stockrecord, we’d expect them to be from from submitted baskets or from old, abandoned baskets. This updating of basket lines has been removed for 1.0 as it incurs additional database queries. Oscar 1.0 now also enforces the stockrecord by making it the stockrecord field of basket Line model no longer nullable.

There is a migration that makes the appropriate schema change but, before that runs, you may need to clean up your basket_line table to ensure that all existing null values are replaced or removed.

Here’s a simple script you could run before upgrading which should ensure there are no nulls in your basket_line table:

from oscar.apps.basket import models
from oscar.apps.partner.strategy import Selector

strategy = Selector().strategy()

lines = models.Line.objects.filter(stockrecord__isnull=True):
for line in lines:
    info = strategy.fetch_for_product(line.product)
    if line.stockrecord:
        line.stockrecord = info.stockrecord
        line.save()
    else:
        line.delete()
  • The reload_page_response method of OrderDetailView has been renamed to reload_page.

Basket app changes

  • The basket:add URL now required the primary key of the “base” product to be included. This allows the same form to be used for both GET and POST requests for variant products.

  • The ProductSelectionForm is no longer used and has been removed.

  • The constructor of the AddToBasketForm has been adjusted to take the basket and the purchase info tuple as parameters instead of the request instance (c74f57bf and 8ba283e8).

Misc

  • The oscar_calculate_scores command has been rewritten to use the ORM instead of raw SQL. That exposed a bug in the previous calculations, where purchases got weighed less than any other event. When you upgrade, your total scores will be change. If you rely on the old behaviour, just extend the Calculator class and adjust the weights.

  • Order.order_number now has unique=True set. If order numbers are not unique in your database, you need to remedy that before migrating. By default, Oscar creates unique order numbers.

  • Product.score was just duplicating ProductRecord.score and has been removed. Use Product.stats.score instead.

  • Oscar has child products to model tightly coupled products, and Product.recommended_products to model products that are loosely related (e.g. used for upselling). Product.related_products was a third option that sat somewhere in between, and which was not well supported. We fear it adds confusion, and in the spirit of keeping Oscar core lean, has been removed. If you’re using it, switch to Product.recommended_products or just add the field back to your custom Product instance and ProductForm when migrating.

  • The basket_form template tag code has been greatly simplified. Because of that, the syntax needed to change slightly.

    Before: {% basket_form request product as basket_form single %}

    After: {% basket_form request product 'single' as basket_form %}

  • Product attribute validation has been cleaned up. As part of that, the trivial ProductAttribute.get_validator and the unused ProductAttribute.is_value_valid methods have been removed.

  • The RangeProductFileUpload model has been moved from the ranges dashboard app to the offers app. The migrations that have been naively drop and re-create the model; any data is lost! This is probably not an issue, as the model is only used while an range upload is in progress. If you need to keep the data, ensure you migrate it across.

  • oscar.core.loading.get_model now raises a LookupError instead of an ImportError if a model can’t be found. That brings it more in line with what Django does since the app refactor.

  • CommunicationEventType.category was storing a localised string, which breaks when switching locale. It now uses choices to map between the value and a localised string. Unfortunately, if you’re using this feature and not running an English locale, you will need to migrate the existing data to the English values.

  • Support for the OSCAR_OFFER_BLACKLIST_PRODUCT setting has been removed. It was only partially supported: it prevented products from being added to a range, but offers could be applied to the products nonetheless. To prevent an offer being applied to a product, use is_discountable

  • Category.get_ancestors used to return a list of ancestors and would default to include itself. For consistency with get_descendants and to avoid having to slice the results in templates, it now returns a queryset of the ancestors; use Category.get_ancestors_and_self for the old behaviour.

  • Weight based shipping methods used to have an upper_charge field which was returned if no weight band matched. That doesn’t work very well in practice, and has been removed. Instead, charges from bands are now added together to match the weight of the basket.

  • The OrderCreator class no longer defaults to free shipping: a shipping method and charge have to be explicitly passed in.

  • The Base shipping method class now lives in oscar.apps.shipping.methods.

  • The find_by_code method of the shipping Repository class has been removed as it is no longer used.

  • The parameters for oscar.apps.shipping.repository.Repository.get_shipping_methods() have been re-ordered to reflect which are the most important.

  • The legacy ShippingMethod name of the interface of the shipping app has been removed. Inherit from shipping.base.Base for the class instead, and inherit from shipping.abstract_models.AbstractBase for model-based shipping methods.

  • oscar.apps.shipping.Scales has been renamed and moved to oscar.apps.shipping.scales.Scale, and is now overridable.

  • The models of the shipping app now have abstract base classes, similar to the rest of Oscar.

  • The legacy ShippingMethod name of the interface of the shipping app has been removed. Inherit from shipping.base.Base for the class instead, and inherit from shipping.abstract_models.AbstractBase for model-based shipping methods.

  • Oscar’s models.py files now define __all__, and it’s dynamically set to only expose unregistered models (which should be what you want) to the namespace. This is important to keep the namespace clean while doing star imports like from oscar.apps.catalogue.models import *. You will have to check your imports to ensure you’re not accidentally relying on e.g. a datetime import that’s pulled in via the star import. Any such import errors will cause a loud failure and should be easy to spot and fix.

Migrations

  • South is no longer a dependency. This means it won’t get installed automatically when you install Oscar. If you are on Django 1.6 and want to use South, you will need to explicitly install it and add it to your requirements.

  • Only South >= 1.0 is supported: South 1.0 is a backwards compatible release explicitly released to help with the upgrade path to Django 1.7. Please make sure you update accordingly if you intend to keep using South. Older versions of South will look in the wrong directories and will break with this Oscar release.

  • Rename your South migrations directories. To avoid clashes between Django’s and South’s migrations, you should rename all your South migrations directories (including those of forked Oscar apps) to south_migrations. South 1.0 will check those first before falling back to migrations.

  • If you’re upgrading to Django 1.7, you will need to follow the instructions to upgrade from South for your own apps. For any forked Oscar apps, you will need to copy Oscar’s initial migrations into your emptied migrations directory first, because Oscar’s set of migrations depend on each other. You can then create migrations for your changes by calling ./manage.py makemigrations. Django should detect that the database layout already matches the state of migrations; so a call to migrate should fake the migrations.

Warning

The catalogue app has a data migration to determine the product structure. Please double-check it’s outcome and make sure to do something similar if you have forked the catalogue app.

Note

The migration numbers below refer to the numbers of the South migrations. Oscar 1.0 ships with a set of new initial migrations for Django’s new native migrations framework. They include all the changes detailed below.

Note

Be sure to read the detailed instructions for handling migrations.

  • Address:

    • 0011 - AbstractAddress.search_text turned into a TextField.

    • 0012 - AbstractCountry: Removed two unused indexes & turns numeric code into CharField

  • Catalogue:

    • 0021 - Add unique_together to ProductAttributeValue, ProductRecommendation and ProductCategory

    • 0022 - Remove Product.score field.

    • 0023 - Drop Product.related_products.

    • 0024 - Change ProductAttributeValue.value_text to a TextField and do entity attribute changes and model deletions.

    • 0025 & 0026 - Schema & data migration to determine and save Product structure.

  • Offer:

    • 0033 - Use an AutoSlug field for Range models

    • 0034 - Add moved RangedProductFileUpload model.

  • Order:

    • 0029 - Add unique_together to PaymentEventQuantity and ShippingEventQuantity

    • 0030 - Set unique=True for Order.order_number

    • 0031 - AbstractAddress.search_text turned into a TextField.

  • Partner:

    • 0014 - AbstractAddress.search_text turned into a TextField.

  • Promotions:

    • 0006 - Add unique_together to OrderedProduct

  • Ranges dashboard:

    • 0003 - Drop RangeProductFileUpload from ranges app. This is

      a destructive change!

  • Shipping:

    • 0007 - Change WeightBand.upper_limit from FloatField to DecimalField

    • 0008 - Drop WeightBased.upper_charge field.

Deprecated features

The following features have been deprecated in this release:

Removal of deprecated features

These methods have been removed:

  • oscar.apps.catalogue.abstract_models.AbstractProduct.has_stockrecord

  • oscar.apps.catalogue.abstract_models.AbstractProduct.stockrecord

  • oscar.apps.catalogue.abstract_models.AbstractProduct.is_available_to_buy

  • oscar.apps.catalogue.abstract_models.AbstractProduct.is_purchase_permitted

  • oscar.apps.catalogue.views.get_product_base_queryset

  • oscar.apps.partner.abstract_models.AbstractStockRecord.is_available_to_buy

  • oscar.apps.partner.abstract_models.AbstractStockRecord.is_purchase_permitted

  • oscar.apps.partner.abstract_models.AbstractStockRecord.availability_code

  • oscar.apps.partner.abstract_models.AbstractStockRecord.availability

  • oscar.apps.partner.abstract_models.AbstractStockRecord.max_purchase_quantity

  • oscar.apps.partner.abstract_models.AbstractStockRecord.dispatch_date

  • oscar.apps.partner.abstract_models.AbstractStockRecord.lead_time

  • oscar.apps.partner.abstract_models.AbstractStockRecord.price_incl_tax

  • oscar.apps.partner.abstract_models.AbstractStockRecord.price_tax

  • oscar.apps.payment.abstract_models.AbstractBankcard.card_number

These classes have been removed:

  • oscar.apps.partner.prices.DelegateToStockRecord

  • oscar.apps.partner.availability.DelegateToStockRecord

  • oscar.apps.payment.utils.Bankcard

Known issues

  • models.py dynamically sets __all__ to control what models are importable through the star import. A bug in the models.py for the partner app means you’ll have to explicitly import them. More info in #1553.