Book Image

Web Development with Django Cookbook- Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Aidas Bendoraitis
Book Image

Web Development with Django Cookbook- Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Aidas Bendoraitis

Overview of this book

Django is a web framework that was designed to strike a balance between rapid web development and high performance. It has the capacity to handle applications with high levels of user traffic and interaction, and can integrate with massive databases on the backend, constantly collecting and processing data in real time. Through this book, you'll discover that collecting data from different sources and providing it to others in different formats isn't as difficult as you thought. It follows a task-based approach to guide you through all the web development processes using the Django framework. We’ll start by setting up the virtual environment for a Django project and configuring it. Then you’ll learn to write reusable pieces of code for your models and find out how to manage database schema changes using South migrations. After that, we’ll take you through working with forms and views to enter and list data. With practical examples on using templates and JavaScript together, you will discover how to create the best user experience. In the final chapters, you'll be introduced to some programming and debugging tricks and finally, you will be shown how to test and deploy the project to a remote dedicated server. By the end of this book, you will have a good understanding of the new features added to Django 1.8 and be an expert at web development processes.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Web Development with Django Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Generating PDF documents


Django views allow you to create much more than just HTML pages. You can generate files of any type. For example, you can create PDF documents for invoices, tickets, booking confirmations, and so on. In this recipe, we will show you how to generate resumes (curriculum vitae) in the PDF format out of the data from the database. We will be using the Pisa xhtml2pdf library, which is very practical as it allows you to use HTML templates to make PDF documents.

Getting ready

First of all, we need to install the xhtml2pdf Python library in your virtual environment:

(myproject_env)$ pip install xhtml2pdf

Then, let's create a cv app containing a simple CV model with the Experience model that is attached to it through a foreign key. The CV model will have these fields: first name, last name, and e-mail. The Experience model will have these fields: the start date of a job, the end date of a job, company, position at that company, and the skills gained:

# cv/models.py
# -*- coding...