Recommendation Providers

In order to compute and retrieve similarities and recommendations, you must create a RecommendationProvider and register it with the model that represents the rating and a list of the models that will receive the votes.

A RecommendationProvider is a class that specifies how to retrieve various informations (items, users, votes) necessary for computing recommendation and similarities for a set of objects.

Subclasses override properties amd methods in order to determine what constitutes rated items, a rating, its score, and user.

The algorithm to use for computing is specified by the algorithm property.

A basic algorithm class is provided for convenience at recommends.algorithms.naive.NaiveAlgorithm, but users can implement their own solutions. See Recommendation Algorithms.

Example:

# models.py
from __future__ import unicode_literals
from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.contrib.sites.models import Site
from django.utils.encoding import python_2_unicode_compatible


@python_2_unicode_compatible
class Product(models.Model):
    """A generic Product"""
    name = models.CharField(blank=True, max_length=100)
    sites = models.ManyToManyField(Site)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.name

    @models.permalink
    def get_absolute_url(self):
        return ('product_detail', [self.id])

    def sites_str(self):
        return ', '.join([s.name for s in self.sites.all()])
    sites_str.short_description = 'sites'


@python_2_unicode_compatible
class Vote(models.Model):
    """A Vote on a Product"""
    user = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name='votes')
    product = models.ForeignKey(Product)
    site = models.ForeignKey(Site)
    score = models.FloatField()

    def __str__(self):
        return "Vote"

Create a file called recommendations.py inside your app:

# recommendations.py

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from recommends.providers import RecommendationProvider
from recommends.providers import recommendation_registry

from .models import Product, Vote

class ProductRecommendationProvider(RecommendationProvider):
    def get_users(self):
        return User.objects.filter(is_active=True, votes__isnull=False).distinct()

    def get_items(self):
        return Product.objects.all()

    def get_ratings(self, obj):
        return Vote.objects.filter(product=obj)

    def get_rating_score(self, rating):
        return rating.score

    def get_rating_site(self, rating):
        return rating.site

    def get_rating_user(self, rating):
        return rating.user

    def get_rating_item(self, rating):
        return rating.product

recommendation_registry.register(Vote, [Product], ProductRecommendationProvider)

All files called recommendations.py will be autodiscovered and loaded by django-recommends. You can change the default module name, or disable autodiscovery by tweaking the RECOMMENDS_AUTODISCOVER_MODULE setting (see Settings), or you could manually import your module in your app’s AppConfig.ready:

# apps.py

from django.apps import AppConfig


class MyAppConfig(AppConfig):
    name = 'my_app'

    def ready(self):
        from .myrecs import *

Properties

  • signals

    This property define to which signals the provider should listen to. A method of the same name will be called on the provider when the corresponding signal is fired from one of the rated model.

    See Signals.

    Defaults to ['django.db.models.pre_delete']

  • algorithm

    Defaults to recommends.algorithms.naive.NaiveAlgorithm

Methods

  • get_items(self)

    This method must return items that have been voted.

  • items_ignored(self)

    Returns user ignored items. User can delete items from the list of recommended.

    See recommends.converters.IdentifierManager.get_identifier for help.

  • get_ratings(self, obj)

    Returns all ratings for given item.

  • get_rating_user(self, rating)

    Returns the user who performed the rating.

  • get_rating_score(self, rating)

    Returns the score of the rating.

  • get_rating_item(self, rating)

    Returns the rated object.

  • get_rating_site(self, rating)

    Returns the site of the rating. Can be a Site object or its ID.

    Defaults to settings.SITE_ID.

  • is_rating_active(self, rating)

    Returns if the rating is active.

  • pre_store_similarities(self, itemMatch)

    Optional. This method will get called right before passing the similarities to the storage.

    For example, you can override this method to do some stats or visualize the data.

  • pre_delete(self, sender, instance, **kwargs)

    This function gets called when a signal in self.rate_signals is fired from one of the rated models.

    Overriding this method is optional. The default method removes the suggestions for the deleted objected.

    See Signals.