Posting to the Twitter API on an admin change

For context, I've been working on a project that involves submitted messages going through a manual review process - once they've been approved in the admin, each message should be posted to Twitter. My Twitter API script is over here, for reference.

I had originally thought I'd set up a cron job to run the posting script, and I still might go back to that if the manual review from the admin starts to take too much time. Doug Hellman suggested using signals, but after some consideration I realized that Django signals would probably be overkill - it's a little disappointing because I've never actually gotten signals working in a project. I need a use case to make me figure it out, and I thought this would be it.

Instead I was browsing some old code and realized that, oh yeah, I can put a save method in my admin class ... honestly, I'm embarrassed that I didn't think of it first - it's a no-brainer.

I just wrapped all the script code in a method:

#!/usr/bin/python

import MySQLdb as Database
import base64, urllib, urllib2

def main():
    db = Database.connect("myhost", "myuser", "mypasswd", "mydbname")
    cursor = db.cursor(Database.cursors.DictCursor)

    sql = """SELECT * FROM twitter_message WHERE approved=1 AND posted=0"""
    cursor.execute(sql)
    data = cursor.fetchall()

    username = "twitter_username"
    password = "twitter_password"

    for record in data:
        message = record["message"]
        message = message.replace(',', '')
        post_data = {'status': message}

        request = urllib2.Request('http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json')
        request.headers['Authorization'] = 'Basic %s' % ( base64.b64encode(username + ':' + password),)
        request.data = urllib.urlencode({'status': message})
        response = urllib2.urlopen(request) # The Response

        """ the most painful part is hacking up the response to get at the status id """
        a = response.read()
        b = a.split(',') ## convert the whole thing to a list
        c = b[30] ## hope the id is always the 30th item in the list
        d = INT(c[5:]) ## strip off first part of string, leave behind the number
      
        if response.code == 200 and type(d) == int:
            record_id = record["id"]
            sql = """UPDATE twitter_message posted=1, post_date=NOW(), status_id=%s WHERE id=%s""" %(d, record_id)
            cursor.execute(sql)

    cursor.close()
    db.close()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Then imported it as a module and called it from the relevant admin.py:

import twitterpost

class TweetAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    def save_model(self, request, obj, form, change):
        obj.save()
        if obj.approved: twitterpost.main()
    list_filter = ('approved',)

Note that the script is called after the obj.save() - the script only acts on records that have already been marked 'approved'.

That's it. Three extra lines of code (six if you count what I added to the script).