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)

Activity 12.01 – creating an API endpoint for a top contributors page

Imagine that your team decides to create a web page that displays the top contributors (authors, coauthors, and editors) in your database. They decide to enlist the services of an external developer to create an app in ReactJS. To integrate with the Django backend, the developer will need an endpoint that provides the following:

  • A list of all contributors in the database
  • For each contributor, a list of all books they contributed to
  • For each contributor, the number of books they contributed to
  • For each book they contributed to, their role in the book

The final API view should look like this:

Figure 12.4: The top contributors endpoint

Figure 12.4: The top contributors endpoint

To perform this task, execute the following steps:

  1. Add a method to the Contributor class that returns the number of contributions made.
  2. Add ContributionSerializer, which serializes the BookContribution model...