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Table Of Contents

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices

By : Ravindran

4.7 (7)

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices

4.7 (7)

By: Ravindran

Overview of this book

If you want to learn how best to utilize commonly found patterns and learn best practices in developing applications with Django, this is the book for you. This book, like Django itself, is accessible to amateur and professional developers alike and assumes little in the way of prior experience. Although written for Python 3, the majority of the code in this book works in Python 2 or can be easily translated.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Django and Patterns

1. Django and Patterns

Why Django?

The story of Django

What is a Pattern?

Patterns in this book

Best practices

Summary

2. Application Design

2. Application Design

How to gather requirements

Are you a story teller?

HTML mockups

Designing the application

Before starting the project

SuperBook – your mission, should you choose to accept it

Summary

3. Models

3. Models

M is bigger than V and C

The model hunt

Structural patterns

Retrieval patterns

Migrations

Summary

4. Views and URLs

4. Views and URLs

A view from the top

Class-based generic views

View mixins

Decorators

View patterns

Designing URLs

Summary

5. Templates

5. Templates

Understanding Django's template language features

Organizing templates

Using Bootstrap

Template patterns

Summary

6. Admin Interface

6. Admin Interface

Using the admin interface

Enhancing models for the admin

Admin interface customizations

Protecting the admin

Summary

7. Forms

7. Forms

How forms work

Displaying forms

Understanding CSRF

Form processing with Class-based views

Form patterns

Summary

8. Dealing with Legacy Code

8. Dealing with Legacy Code

Finding the Django version

Where are the files? This is not PHP

Starting with urls.py

Jumping around the code

Understanding the code base

Incremental change or a full rewrite?

Write tests before making any changes

Legacy databases

Summary

9. Testing and Debugging

9. Testing and Debugging

Why write tests?

Test-driven development

Writing a test case

Mocking

Pattern – test fixtures and factories

Learning more about testing

Debugging

The print function

Logging

The Django Debug Toolbar

The Python debugger pdb

Other debuggers

Debugging Django templates

Summary

10. Security

10. Security

Cross-site scripting (XSS)

A handy security checklist

Summary

11. Production-ready

11. Production-ready

Production environment

Hosting

Deployment tools

Monitoring

Performance

Summary

A. Python 2 versus Python 3

A. Python 2 versus Python 3

But I still use Python 2.7!

Python 3

Further information

Index

Index

A view from the top

In Django, a view is defined as a callable that accepts a request and returns a response. It is usually a function or a class with a special class method such as as_view().

In both cases, we create a normal Python function that takes an HTTPRequest as the first argument and returns an HTTPResponse. A URLConf can also pass additional arguments to this function. These arguments can be captured from parts of the URL or set to default values.

Here is what a simple view looks like:

# In views.py
from django.http import HttpResponse

def hello_fn(request, name="World"):
    return HttpResponse("Hello {}!".format(name))

Our two-line view function is quite simple to understand. We are currently not doing anything with the request argument. We can examine a request to better understand the context in which the view was called, for example by looking at the GET/POST parameters, URI path, or HTTP headers such as REMOTE_ADDR.

Its corresponding lines in URLConf would be as follows:

# In...

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