About Managers

Introduction

Masonite uses an extremely powerful pattern commonly known as the Manager Pattern; also known as the Builder Pattern. Because Masonite uses classes with the XManager namespace, we will call it the Manager Pattern throughout this documentation.

Think of the Manager Pattern as attaching a Manager to a specific feature. This Manager is responsible for instantiating FeatureXDriver classes. For example, we attach a UploadManager to the upload feature. Now the UploadFeature will instantiate UploadXDriver classes.

For an actual example inside Masonite, there are currently two classes for the Upload feature: UploadDiskDriver and UploadS3Driver. Whenever we set the DRIVER in our config/storage.py file to s3, the UploadManager will use the UploadS3Driver to store our files.

This is extremely useful for extending functionality of the managers. If we need to upload to Google, we can just make a UploadGoogleDriver and put it inside the container. If we set our configuration DRIVER to google, our UploadManager will now use that class to store files.

Creating a Manager

Masonite obviously comes with several managers such as the UploadManager and the MailManager. Let's walk through how to create a new manager called the TaskManager.

Managers can live wherever they want but if you are developing a manager for the Masonite core package, they will be placed inside masonite/managers.

Let's create a new file: masonite/managers/TaskManager.py.

Great! Now all managers should inherit from the masonite.managers.Manager class. Our TaskManager should look something like:

from masonite.managers import Manager

class TaskManager(Manager):
    pass

Awesome! Inheriting from the Manager class will give our manager almost all the methods it needs. The only thing we need now is to tell this manager how to create drivers. So to do this all we need are two attributes:

from masonite.managers import Manager

class TaskManager(Manager):

    config = 'TaskConfig'
    driver_prefix = 'Task'

Perfect. Managers are both extremely powerful and easy to create. That's it. That's our entire provider. The config attribute is the configuration file you want which is key in the container and the driver_prefix is the drivers you want to manager. In this case it is the TaskDriver. This manager will manage all drivers in the container that conform to the namespaces of Task{0}Driver like TaskTodoDriver and TaskNoteDriver.

Notice that the config is TaskConfig and not task. This attribute is the binding name and not the config name. We can bind the task config into the container like so:

from config import task

container.bind('TaskConfig', task)

Which will be required to use our new task manager since it relies on the task configuration. You can do this inside the Service Provider that will ship with this manager. We will create a Service Provider later on but for now just know that that's where that configuration comes from.

Using Our Manager

We can use our manager simply by loading it into the container. We can do this by creating a Service Provider. Learn more about how to create a Service Provider in the Service Providers documentation. Let's show what a basic Service Provider might look like:

from masonite.provider import ServiceProvider
from masonite.drivers.TaskTodoDriver import TaskTodoDriver
from masonite.managers.TaskManager import TaskManager
from config import task

class TaskProvider(ServiceProvider):

    wsgi = False

    def register(self):
        self.app.bind('TaskConfig', task)
        self.app.bind('TaskTodoDriver', TaskTodoDriver)
        self.app.bind('TaskManager', TaskManager(self.app))

    def boot(self, TaskManager, TaskConfig):
        self.app.bind('Task', TaskManager.driver(TaskConfig.DRIVER))

Great! We can put this Service Provider in our app/application.py file inside the PROVIDERS list. Once that is inside our providers list we can now use this new Task alias in our controllers like so:

def show(self, Task):
    Task.method_here()

Notice that we binded the TaskManager into the container under the Task key. Because of this we can now pass the Task in any parameter set that is resolved by the container like a controller method. Since we passed the Task into the parameter set, Masonite will automatically inject whatever the Task key from the container contains.

Read about how to create drivers for your Manager class under the About Drivers documentation.