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)

Working with GET, POST, and QueryDict objects

Data can come through an HTTP request as parameters on a URL or inside the body of a POST request. You might have noticed parameters in a URL when browsing the web – the text after ? – for example, http://www.example.com/?parameter1=value1&parameter2=value2. We also saw earlier in this chapter an example of form data in a POST request to log in a user (the request body was username=user&password=password1).

Django automatically parses these parameter strings into QueryDict objects. The data is then available on the HttpRequest object that is passed to your view – specifically, in the HttpRequest.GET and HttpRequest.POST attributes for URL parameters and body parameters respectively. QueryDict objects mostly behave like dictionaries, except that they can contain multiple values for a key.

To show different methods of accessing items in, we’ll use a simple QueryDict (the qd variable) with only one...