When Django's translation() dies a painful death

This post was written on 2006/12/06 at 10:04:53 by Horst Gutmann

Finally something about coding here ;-) I've just started working on a little project for a friend and I guess in the days to come I will probably write a little bit about things I learned about Django and also describe fixes for problems I faced.

So on to the first problem: If you ever get something like this with Django: 

   "<PREFIX>/django/utils/translation/trans_real.py", line 167, in _fetch
       app = getattr(import(appname[:p], {}, {}, [appname[p+1:]]), appname[p+1:])
   AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '<APP_IN_PROJ>'

this might be caused by circular imports within your INSTALLED_APPS. To make this more clear here a small example:

I have app proj.base and another app proj.menus. Now I got the great idea of writing some utility functions to make my life much easier. And to make it even more easier I put everything right into the __init__.py of proj.base.

And the problem is now what exactly? Well, on of my utility functions uses a model from proj.menus. So I imported this app's models right in proj.base's __init__.py. For some reason now, this (or at least something in this direction) causes severe trouble with Django's translation subsystem. Sorry for that incomplete example, but I somehow couldn't completely reproduce this problem with a blank project.

So now I simply put everything I previously had in base's __init__.py into a utils.py in the same module, and finally everything works :)

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