Common Django libraries and components at the City of Helsinki
In general, new projects tend to couple to some City of Helsinki APIs, most importantly authentication, geospatial data, city organization and notification. For these purposes, we have existing Django libraries common to several projects. You are encouraged to use these in your own project and contribute to them to suit your own needs and help others using the same libraries.
For more general technology and library choices, please read technology choices. A repository for smaller Python utils is also available.
Authentication
The django-helusers app will integrate Django user model with the Helsinki SSO Tunnistamo, creating/identifying Django users automatically when the SSO gives the green light, with the necessary contact information and e.g. AD groups if your application needs them for user permissions.
Geospatial data
The django-munigeo app will populate your PostGIS database with all manner of location data that you may need in geographical queries with Geodjango, such as Finnish municipalities, Helsinki neighborhoods, districts and their boundaries, locations of street addresses in the Helsinki region, and various other districts and boundaries used by various parts of the city bureaucracy.
Most of the datasets used by django-munigeo are found in the Helsinki Region Infoshare open data portal, which has many more datasets available. For more detailed information on our available geospatial and map data, please read map layers. If the dataset you need does not have an importer in django-munigeo yet, please implement the import and create a PR in django-munigeo!
City organization
The django-orghierarchy app provides support for hierarchical user management in a multilevel organization hierarchy. That way, you can have regular and admin users on many levels in your app, from the city and division level all the way down to a users in a single city unit providing a specific service.
Also provided is an importer to import the existing hierarchy into your Django app. So, if your application is expected to have lots of users around the city hierarchy on many different levels, this will help your product owner to allocate each user to the correct location in the city organization. An example of how the hierarchy is used in user permission management is e.g. Linkedevents.
Notification
The django-ilmoitin app allows you to couple your Django models save methods and/or signals to Helsinki Mailgun account for sending email notifications, modeled after templates editable in django-admin, to Django users after certain events, either instantly or via a message queue.