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)

Generating CSV, PDF, and Other Binary Files

So far, we have learned about the various aspects of the Django framework and explored how we can build web applications using Django with all the features and customizations we want.

Let’s say that, while building a web application, we need to do some analysis and prepare some reports. We may need to analyze user demographics about how the platform is being used or generate data that can be fed into machine learning systems to find patterns. We want our website to display some of the results of our analysis in a tabular format and other results as detailed graphs and charts. Furthermore, we want to allow our users to export the reports and peruse them further in applications such as Jupyter Notebook and Excel.

As we work our way through this chapter, we will learn how to bring these ideas to fruition and implement functionality in our web application that allows us to export records into structured formats such as tables through...