Book Image

Web Development with Django Cookbook- Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Aidas Bendoraitis
Book Image

Web Development with Django Cookbook- Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Aidas Bendoraitis

Overview of this book

Django is a web framework that was designed to strike a balance between rapid web development and high performance. It has the capacity to handle applications with high levels of user traffic and interaction, and can integrate with massive databases on the backend, constantly collecting and processing data in real time. Through this book, you'll discover that collecting data from different sources and providing it to others in different formats isn't as difficult as you thought. It follows a task-based approach to guide you through all the web development processes using the Django framework. We’ll start by setting up the virtual environment for a Django project and configuring it. Then you’ll learn to write reusable pieces of code for your models and find out how to manage database schema changes using South migrations. After that, we’ll take you through working with forms and views to enter and list data. With practical examples on using templates and JavaScript together, you will discover how to create the best user experience. In the final chapters, you'll be introduced to some programming and debugging tricks and finally, you will be shown how to test and deploy the project to a remote dedicated server. By the end of this book, you will have a good understanding of the new features added to Django 1.8 and be an expert at web development processes.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Web Development with Django Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Passing HttpRequest to the form


The first argument of every Django view is the HttpRequest object that is usually named request. It contains metadata about the request. For example, current language code, current user, current cookies, and current session. By default, the forms that are used in the views accept the GET or POST parameters, files, initial data, and other parameters; however, not the HttpRequest object. In some cases, it is useful to additionally pass HttpRequest to the form, especially when you want to filter out the choices of form fields using the request data or handle saving something such as the current user or IP in the form.

In this recipe, we will see an example of a form where a person can choose a user and write a message to them. We will pass the HttpRequest object to the form in order to exclude the current user from the recipient choices; we don't want anybody to write a message to themselves.

Getting ready

Let's create a new app called email_messages and put it...