Book Image

Web Development with Django - Second Edition

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Chris Guest, Bharath Chandra K S
4.7 (3)
Book Image

Web Development with Django - Second Edition

4.7 (3)
By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Chris Guest, Bharath Chandra K S

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications that stand out from the crowd without spending hours on boilerplate code? You’ve made the right choice trusting the Django framework, and this book will tell you why. Often referred to as a “batteries included” web development framework, Django comes with all the core features needed to build a standalone application. Web Development with Django will take you through all the essential concepts and help you explore its power to build real-world applications using Python. Throughout the book, you’ll get the grips with the major features of Django by building a website called Bookr – a repository for book reviews. This end-to-end case study is split into a series of bitesize projects presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you advance, you'll acquire various practical skills, including how to serve static files to add CSS, JavaScript, and images to your application, how to implement forms to accept user input, and how to manage sessions to ensure a reliable user experience. You’ll cover everyday tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this Django book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively develop and deploy your own projects.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Exploring URL mapping detail

We briefly mentioned URL maps earlier in the Processing a request section. Django does not automatically know which view function should be executed when it receives a request for a particular URL. The role of URL mapping is to build a link between a URL and a view. For example, in Bookr, you might want to map the /books/ URL to a books_list view that you have created.

The URL-to-view mapping is defined in the file that Django automatically created called urls.py, inside the bookr package directory (although a different file can be set in settings.py; there’ll be more on that later).

This file contains a variable, urlpatterns, which is a list of paths that Django evaluates in turn until it finds a match for the URL being requested. The match will either resolve to a view function or another urls.py file, also containing a urlpatterns variable, which will be resolved in the same manner. URL files can be chained in this manner for as long as...