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

Custom Field Validation and Cleaning

We have seen how a Django form converts values from an HTTP request, which are strings, into Python objects. In a non-custom Django form, the target type is dependent on the field class. For example, the Python type derived from IntegerField is int, and string values are given to us verbatim, as the user entered them. But we can also implement methods on our Form class to alter the output values from our fields in any way we choose. The allows us to clean or filter the user's input data to fit what we expect better. We could round an integer to the nearest multiple of ten to fit into a batch size for ordering specific items. Or we could transform an email address to lowercase so that the data is consistent for searching.

We can also implement some custom validators. We will look at a couple of different ways of validating fields: by writing a custom validator, and by writing a custom clean method for the field. Each method has its pros and...