id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
36600	Misleading wording in description of dispatch_uid	Roman Donchenko	Amar	"The [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/signals/#preventing-duplicate-signals documentation for signals] currently says the following:

> In some circumstances, the code connecting receivers to signals may run multiple times. This can cause your receiver function to be registered more than once, and thus called as many times for a signal event. For example, the `ready()` method may be executed more than once during testing. More generally, this occurs everywhere your project imports the module where you define the signals, because signal registration runs as many times as it is imported.

There are a few problems here. First, the last sentence just seems wrong. Importing a module multiple times does not run its code multiple times; therefore it should be completely safe to do this with a module containing signal handlers.

It seems that `dispatch_uid` was originally introduced to work around a problem where a module would be imported multiple times ''with different names'' (#3951), but that problem has long been fixed (#15372).

Moreover, even if the signal handler is registered directly in `ready()`, and `ready()` is called multiple times, it appears that in many cases `dispatch_uid` is still unnecessary. When it's unspecified, the [https://github.com/django/django/blob/46fdeb1373aa7e9089d14440987444493cc9c2e0/django/dispatch/dispatcher.py#L13-L16 implementation] effectively uses a default `dispatch_uid` of `(id(target.__self__), id(target.__func__))` when the target is a method, or `id(target)` in all other cases. This means that code like this should work fine:

{{{#!python
def my_handler():
    ...

class MyAppConfig(AppConfig):
    def ready(self):
        my_signal.connect(my_handler)
}}}

However, this is not explained in the docs.

Because of these problems, the docs end up encouraging users to use `dispatch_uid` everywhere, even though it's really only necessary in some specific cases (i.e., when the handler is not a global function or a static/class method of a global class). I think they should be edited to explain the use case more clearly.
"	Bug	closed	Documentation	5.2	Normal	fixed			Ready for checkin	1	0	0	0	0	0