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.. _deferred-callbacks:
Deferred Request Callbacks
==========================
One of the design principles of Flask is that response objects are created
and passed down a chain of potential callbacks that can modify them or
replace them. When the request handling starts, there is no response
object yet. It is created as necessary either by a view function or by
some other component in the system.
But what happens if you want to modify the response at a point where the
response does not exist yet? A common example for that would be a
before-request function that wants to set a cookie on the response object.
One way is to avoid the situation. Very often that is possible. For
instance you can try to move that logic into an after-request callback
instead. Sometimes however moving that code there is just not a very
pleasant experience or makes code look very awkward.
As an alternative possibility you can attach a bunch of callback functions
to the :data:`~flask.g` object and call them at the end of the request.
This way you can defer code execution from anywhere in the application.
The Decorator
-------------
The following decorator is the key. It registers a function on a list on
the :data:`~flask.g` object::
from flask import g
def after_this_request(f):
if not hasattr(g, 'after_request_callbacks'):
g.after_request_callbacks = []
g.after_request_callbacks.append(f)
return f
Calling the Deferred
--------------------
Now you can use the `after_this_request` decorator to mark a function to
be called at the end of the request. But we still need to call them. For
this the following function needs to be registered as
:meth:`~flask.Flask.after_request` callback::
@app.after_request
def call_after_request_callbacks(response):
for callback in getattr(g, 'after_request_callbacks', ()):
callback(response)
return response
A Practical Example
-------------------
Now we can easily at any point in time register a function to be called at
the end of this particular request. For example you can remember the
current language of the user in a cookie in the before-request function::
from flask import request
@app.before_request
def detect_user_language():
language = request.cookies.get('user_lang')
if language is None:
language = guess_language_from_request()
@after_this_request
def remember_language(response):
response.set_cookie('user_lang', language)
g.language = language