RapidSMS 0.13.0 release notes

Welcome to RapidSMS 0.13.0! These release notes cover the new features 0.13.0 as well as some Backwards-incompatible changes in RapidSMS 0.13.0 you’ll want to be aware of when upgrading from RapidSMS 0.12.0.

What’s New

  • Added support for sending bulk messages. This involved the following changes:

    • Modified MessageBase to accept multiple connections.

    • Updated rapidsms.router.send() to pass multiple connections (within a message object) to the Router. The Messaging API already supported multiple connections, so the API did not change.

    • Updated rapidsms.backends.base.BackendBase.send() signature to always expect multiple connections and changed the signature to accept text and identities, rather than a message object. Child classes must now override this function.

    • Updated BlockingRouter to inspect outbound message connections, group by backend, and call backend.send for each one.

  • Added the database-powered DatabaseRouter. The DatabaseRouter stores all messages in the database and keeps track of received/sent state of each message. This is useful for monitoring the sending of large message volumes.

  • Added a backend for Vumi.

  • Cleaned up admin for Connection to load faster with database JOINs.

  • Added delivery report functionality for Kannel.

  • Combined the BaseRouter and BlockingRouter together. Now all base routing functionality is handled by BlockingRouter.

  • In order to better support customization of routers, messages now pass through receive_incoming and process_incoming methods. This additional layer allows the CeleryRouter and DatabaseRouter to more easily customize message processing.

  • The Messaging API now asks the router to instantiate incoming and outgoing messages via the new_incoming_message and new_outgoing_message methods. This allows the router to better customize the message classes.

  • Reworked the CeleryRouter to pass identifiers, rather than instantiated objects, to background tasks. This avoids tasks possibly using outdated data when unpickling task arguments.

  • Removed rapidsms.tests.harness.setting.

  • Added requests as a dependency. Vumi and Kannel now use requests to construct HTTP requests. You’ll need to run pip install requests or add requests to your requirements file.

  • Added initial migrations for South support. South handles making incremental changes to database tables as Django models change. To start using:

    python manage.py syncdb --all

    • Tell South that everything is up to date:

    python manage.py migrate --fake

    Once South is set up, future upgrades of RapidSMS should just require manage.py migrate to update your database tables.

  • Deprecated rapidsms.log.mixin.LoggerMixin. Please update all logging to use the standard logging module. That includes code that might use LoggerMixin indirectly by extending AppBase, BackendBase, or BaseHandler. Search for code like self.error(...) or self.debug(...) and change to logger.error(...) or logger.debug(...) after creating a logger object as above. You’ll want most logging to look like this:

import logging
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
logger.info(...)
logger.debug(...)

  • The HTTPTester contrib app has been changed to use the new Database backend instead of its own backend. The HTTPTester backend has been removed. Please remove "rapidsms.contrib.httptester.backend" from INSTALLED_BACKENDS and review the HTTPTester configuration.

  • Added created_on and modified_on fields to the Contact and Connection models. On initial migration, any existing records will have those fields set to the current time.

Backwards-incompatible changes in RapidSMS 0.13.0

In the goal of improving the RapidSMS core, we have made a number of backwards- incompatible changes.

Backend configuration must point to a class

In previous versions of RapidSMS, you would define backends like so:

INSTALLED_BACKENDS = {
    "kannel-fake-smsc" : {
        "ENGINE":  "rapidsms.backends.kannel",
    }
}

Now, backends must specify the name of the class:

INSTALLED_BACKENDS = {
    "kannel-fake-smsc" : {
        "ENGINE":  "rapidsms.backends.kannel.KannelBackend",
    }
}

This change was made to be more explicit. This also simplifies the importing architecture.

Changed Backend.send signature

All existing backends must be updated to use the new signature. The router used to pass just a message object to BackendBase.send. The signature has been updated to accept an id_, text, list of identities, and a context dictionary. All backends will need to be updated to use this signature. Please see BackendBase.send for more details.

Removed start/stop methods

We removed the left over start and stop methods for the router, backends, and apps. These were important for the legacy, threaded router, but are no longer necessary with new-routing. If your apps and backends use these methods, you’ll need to move the functionality to __init__.

Removed Message translation functionality

Now that Message objects can contain multiple connections, the internal translation bits needed to change. Messages can be sent to connections that specify different default languages. We removed all translation functionality from the Message objects and require the developer to handle it explicitly.

The internationalization documentation has been updated.

Changed HTTPTester to use Database backend

The HTTPTester contrib app has been changed to use the new Database backend instead of its own backend. The HTTPTester backend has been removed. Please remove "rapidsms.contrib.httptester.backend" from INSTALLED_BACKENDS and review the HTTPTester configuration.