Disable Creating Historical Records

`save_without_historical_record()` and `delete_without_historical_record()`

These methods are automatically added to a model when registering it for history-tracking (i.e. defining a HistoricalRecords manager on the model), and can be called instead of save() and delete(), respectively.

Using the `disable_history()` context manager

disable_history() has three ways of being called:

With no arguments: This will disable all historical record creation (as if the SIMPLE_HISTORY_ENABLED setting was set to False; see below) within the context manager’s with block.
With only_for_model: Only disable history creation for the provided model type.
With instance_predicate: Only disable history creation for model instances passing this predicate.

See some examples below:

from simple_history.utils import disable_history

# No historical records are created
with disable_history():
    User.objects.create(...)
    Poll.objects.create(...)

# A historical record is only created for the poll
with disable_history(only_for_model=User):
    User.objects.create(...)
    Poll.objects.create(...)

# A historical record is created for the second poll, but not for the first poll
# (remember to check the instance type in the passed function if you expect
# historical records of more than one model to be created inside the `with` block)
with disable_history(instance_predicate=lambda poll: "ignore" in poll.question):
    Poll.objects.create(question="ignore this")
    Poll.objects.create(question="what's up?")

Overriding `create_historical_record()`

For even more fine-grained control, you can subclass HistoricalRecords and override its create_historical_record() method, for example like this:

class CustomHistoricalRecords(HistoricalRecords):
    def create_historical_record(
        self, instance: models.Model, history_type: str, *args, **kwargs
    ) -> None:
    # Don't create records for "ignore" polls that are being deleted
    if "ignore" in poll.question and history_type == "-":
        return

    super().create_historical_record(instance, history_type, *args, **kwargs)


class Poll(models.Model):
    # ...
    history = CustomHistoricalRecords()

The `SIMPLE_HISTORY_ENABLED` setting

Disable the creation of historical records for all models by adding the following line to your settings:

SIMPLE_HISTORY_ENABLED = False