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

Testing Django Views

Views in Django control the rendering of the HTTP response for users based on the URL they visit in a web application. In this section, we will get on to understand how we can test views inside Django. Imagine you are working on a website where a lot of Application Programming Interface (API) endpoints are required. An interesting question to ask would be, how will you be able to validate every new endpoint? If done manually, you will have to first deploy the application every time a new endpoint is added, then manually visit the endpoint in the browser to validate whether it is working fine or not. Such an approach may work out when the number of endpoints is low but may become extremely cumbersome if there are hundreds of endpoints.

Django provides a very comprehensive way of testing application views. This happens with the use of a testing client class provided by Django's test module. This class can be used to visit URLs mapped to the views and...