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Comment Tagging

Purpose: Allow users to @mention other users in comments, automatically scraping tagged usernames from comment text and making the user list available to the tagging widget.

Why Tagging?

Comments often need to pull specific people into a conversation. The Comment Tagging system provides:

  • Automatic username scraping from comment text using @username syntax
  • A utility to resolve tagged usernames to User objects
  • A queryset helper to find users with access to a given model
  • A TaggingWidget for rendering an autocomplete mention interface

Core Concepts

@mention Syntax

Tags are written inline in comment text as @username. The Comment model scrapes these automatically.

comment.information = 'Hey @john_doe can you review this?'

comment.scrape_username_list()
# ['john_doe']

comment.find_user_list()
# <QuerySet [<User: john_doe>]>

scrape_username_list()

Parses the comment's information field and returns a list of raw usernames (without the @ prefix).

comment.scrape_username_list() -> list[str]

find_user_list()

Resolves the scraped usernames to a User queryset.

comment.find_user_list() -> QuerySet[User]

Main Operations

Finding Taggable Users for an Object

Use find_user_list_from_content_type to get all users who have view permission on a given model — these are the candidates available in the tagging autocomplete.

from django_spire.comment.utils import find_user_list_from_content_type

user_list = find_user_list_from_content_type(
    app_label='blog',
    model_name='blogpost',
)

This returns all users belonging to a group that has the view_<model_name> permission for the given content type.

Generating Autocomplete Data for the Widget

Convert the user queryset to the JSON structure the TaggingWidget expects:

from django_spire.comment.utils import generate_comment_user_list_data

user_list_data = generate_comment_user_list_data(user_list)
# [{'full_name': 'John_Doe', 'id': 1}, ...]

Names are returned with spaces replaced by underscores to match the @mention format.

Using the Tagging Template Tag

The user_list_from_content_type template tag retrieves taggable users directly in a template:

{% load comment_tags %}
{% user_list_from_content_type blog_post as taggable_users %}

The result can then be passed to the comment form or widget.