Example Custom Actions

We have a new type of action that we’ve found ourselves writing over and over again. Our project has a system that allows us to send emails to customers for things like welcome messages, password resets, and notifications. Sometimes, though, these messages need to be resent to a customer if they didn’t receive them the first time.

This is what our custom admin action class might look like. We’ve overridden the handle_item method so that it looks up an email template before calling the provided function to send the email. We’ve also overridden the __init__ method to accept a new parameter for the email template name.

actions/send_email.py

from action_hero.lib import AdminActionBaseClass
from some_email_module import get_email_template

class SendEmailAction(AdminActionBaseClass):
    """An admin action that sends an email to selected users."""

    def __init__(
        self,
        function: Function,
        *,
        email_template: str,
        condition: Condition | None = None,
        name: str | None = None,
    ) -> None:
        super().__init__(function, condition=condition,
            name=name or f"Send Email: {email_template}")
        self.email_template = email_template

    def handle_item(self, user: Model) -> None:
        email_template = get_email_template(self.email_template)
        self.function(to=user.email, template=email_template)

Now we can use our SendEmailAction class to make actions for our admin interface. Here’s an example of how we might use it to create an action that sends a welcome email to selected users.

admin.py

from .actions.send_email import SendEmailAction
from some_email_module import send_email
from myapp.models import User

class UserAdmin(AdminInterface):
    model = User
    actions = [
        SendEmailAction(
            function=send_email,
            email_template="welcome_email",
            name="Send Welcome Email",
        ),
    ]

With this setup, when an admin selects users in the admin interface and chooses the “Send Welcome Email” action, the system will send the welcome email template to each selected user’s email address. This makes it easy to resend important emails without having to write the email-sending logic from scratch each time. Adding new emails to resend is as simple as creating a new instance of the SendEmailAction with the desired template name.

admin.py

    actions = [
        SendEmailAction(
            function=send_email,
            email_template="welcome_email",
            name="Send Welcome Email",
        ),
        SendEmailAction(
            function=send_email,
            email_template="password_reset",
            name="Send Password Reset Email",
        ),
    ]

This approach keeps our code DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) and makes it easy to manage email-sending actions in our admin interface. It also allows us to easily control which emails can be resent by simply adding or removing instances of the SendEmailAction class in any admin. This means we could quickly send a “Password Reset Email” from our users admin and also an “Order Shipped” email from our orders admin, all while reusing the same action class.