Book Image

Web Development with Django

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest
Book Image

Web Development with Django

By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications which stand out from the crowd, rather than spending hours on boilerplate code? Then the Django framework is where you should begin. 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 takes this philosophy and equips you with the knowledge and confidence to build real-world applications using Python. Starting with the essential concepts of Django, you'll cover its major features 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 that are presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you progress, you'll learn 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. Throughout this book, you'll cover key daily tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Django.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface

The Django Forms Library

We've looked at how to manually write forms in HTML and how to access the data on the request object using QueryDict. We saw that the browser provides some validation for us for certain field types, such as email or numbers, but we have not tried validating the data in the Python view. We should validate the form in the Python view for two reasons:

  • It is not safe to rely solely on browser-based validation of input data. A browser may not implement certain validation features, meaning the user could post any type of data. For example, older browsers don't validate number fields, so a user can type in a number outside the range we are expecting. Furthermore, a malicious user could try to send harmful data without using a browser at all. The browser validation should be considered as a nicety for the user and that's all.
  • The browser does not allow us to do cross-field validation. For example, we can use the required attribute for inputs...