How do you do something after you render the view? (Django)

Question

I want to do something after I have rendered the view using

return render_to_response()

Are signals the only way to do this? Do I need to write a custom signal or does request_finished give me enough information? Basically I need to know what page was rendered, and then do an action in response to that.

Thanks.

UPDATE FROM COMMENTS: I don't want to hold up the rendering of the page, so I want to render the page first and then do the action.

Answer 1

A common way to do this is to use message queues. You place a message on the queue, and worker threads (or processes, etc.) consume the queue and do the work after your view has completed.

Google App Engine has the task queue api http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/taskqueue/, amazon has the Simple Queue Service http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/.

A quick search didn't turn up any django pluggables that look like accepted standards.

A quick and dirty way to emulate the functionality is to place the 'message' in a database table, and have a cron job periodically check the table to perform the work.