Writing Feature Checkers¶

Feature checkers are small classes that determine whether a feature should be enabled or disabled. They do this by making a determination based on a feature stability level and based on any arguments passed to the checker.

Any application that ties features to users or their teams, or has other more complex needs, will have to write a feature checker.

Feature Enabled Checks¶

When writing a feature checker, you usually will only need to implement a single function: is_feature_enabled(). This is used to determine if a feature is enabled, based on some criteria defined by the checker. This criteria can include some global state (such as pre-configured settings) or can be based off keyword arguments passed to the function.

For instance, you may want to write a feature checker that takes into account the enabled feature IDs in a user’s profile, falling back on values in settings.py:

from django.conf import settings
from djblets.features.checkers import BaseFeatureChecker


class MyFeatureChecker(BaseFeatureChecker):
    def is_feature_enabled(self, feature_id, user=None, **kwargs):
        if user:
            enabled_features = user.get_profile().enabled_features
        else:
            enabled_features = settings.ENABLED_FEATURES

        return enabled_features.get(feature_id, False)

You can do pretty much anything in this method, including querying a database. It’s really up to you.

It’s important to note that your checker may be passed keyword arguments it doesn’t expect, and may not be passed arguments it does expect. It’s important to handle all cases, and to always return True or False. It must never raise an exception.

Minimum Levels¶

A feature checker can also specify the minimum level for an enabled feature, or can outright reject features based on their stability level. It does this by overriding the min_enabled_level() property.

For example, to enable all beta features based on a key in settings:

from django.conf import settings
from djblets.features.checkers import BaseFeatureChecker
from djblets.features.level import FeatureLevel


class MyFeatureChecker(BaseFeatureChecker):
    @property
    def min_enabled_level(self):
        if settings.ENABLE_BETA_FEATURES:
            return FeatureLevel.BETA
        else:
            return FeatureLevel.STABLE

If you just want to hard-code a default for all cases, simply set this as an attribute:

from djblets.features.checkers import BaseFeatureChecker
from djblets.features.level import FeatureLevel


class MyFeatureChecker(BaseFeatureChecker):
    min_enabled_level = FeatureLevel.BETA

If you’re doing something more complex, and only ever need to do it once, you may want to use a @cached_property decorator. For example, we might want to use it for our settings-based check above, to avoid the unnecessary setting lookup:

from django.utils.functional import cached_property
from djblets.features.checkers import BaseFeatureChecker
from djblets.features.level import FeatureLevel


class MyFeatureChecker(BaseFeatureChecker):
    @cached_property
    def min_enabled_level(self):
        if settings.ENABLE_BETA_FEATURES:
            return FeatureLevel.BETA
        else:
            return FeatureLevel.STABLE