Book Image

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By : Arun Ravindran
Book Image

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By: Arun Ravindran

Overview of this book

Building secure and maintainable web applications requires comprehensive knowledge. The second edition of this book not only sheds light on Django, but also encapsulates years of experience in the form of design patterns and best practices. Rather than sticking to GoF design patterns, the book looks at higher-level patterns. Using the latest version of Django and Python, you’ll learn about Channels and asyncio while building a solid conceptual background. The book compares design choices to help you make everyday decisions faster in a rapidly changing environment. You’ll first learn about various architectural patterns, many of which are used to build Django. You’ll start with building a fun superhero project by gathering the requirements, creating mockups, and setting up the project. Through project-guided examples, you’ll explore the Model, View, templates, workflows, and code reusability techniques. In addition to this, you’ll learn practical Python coding techniques in Django that’ll enable you to tackle problems related to complex topics such as legacy coding, data modeling, and code reusability. You’ll discover API design principles and best practices, and understand the need for asynchronous workflows. During this journey, you’ll study popular Python code testing techniques in Django, various web security threats and their countermeasures, and the monitoring and performance of your application.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Template patterns


Django's template language is quite simple. However, you can save a lot of time by following some elegant template design patterns. Let's take a look at some of them.

Pattern — template inheritance tree

Problem: Templates need lots of common markup in several pages.

Solution: Use template inheritance wherever possible and include snippets elsewhere.

Problem details

Users expect pages of a website to follow a consistent structure. Certain interface elements, such as navigation menu, headers, and footers are seen in most web applications. However, it is cumbersome to repeat them in every template.

Most templating languages have an include mechanism. The contents of another file, possibly a template, can be included at the position where it is invoked. This can get tedious in a large project.

The sequence of the snippets to be included in every template would be mostly the same. The ordering is important and hard to check for mistakes. Ideally, we should be able to create a base...