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 1 – Book Search

In this activity, you will finish the Book Search view that was started in Chapter 1. You will build a SearchForm that submits and accepts a search string from request.GET. It will have a select field to choose to search for a title or contributor. It will then search for all books containing the given text in their title or contributor’s first_names or last_names. You will then render this list of books in the search-results.html template. The search term should not be required, but if it exists, it should have a length of more than three characters. Since the view will search even when using the GET method, the form will always have its validation checked. If we made the field required, it would always show an error whenever the page loads.

There will be two ways of performing the search. The first is by submitting the search form that is in the base.html template and thus in the top-right corner of every page. This will only search through...