Concepts

Each Django project can be composed of many apps. An app is a small project that should focus on performing one task (e.g. A website project can have: a blog, ratings, news apps).

Django project structure

A typical Django project, at first, has a very basic layout. After following Django docs suggestions, like creating the project $ django-admin startproject my_project and some app $ python manage.py startapp my_app will create the following structure:

.
└── mysite/
    ├── manage.py
    ├── mysite/
    |   ├── __init__.py
    |   ├── settings.py
    |   ├── urls.py
    |   └── wsgi.py
    └── myapp/
        ├── __init__.py
        ├── admin.py
        ├── apps.py
        ├── migrations/
        ├── __init__.py
        ├── models.py
        ├── tests.py
        ├── urls.py
        └── views.py

The structure that sets up Django by default is very basic, when a project starts to grow, it starts to require a better approach, outlined in Django directory structure that deals with other aspects of development and deployment such as:

• deployment scripts
• separated tests by units
• having different environments for development, production (staging)
• documentation for the project

Models

Fat models, thin views.

Views

• Generic views https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/topics/class-based-views/generic-display/

Templates

Forms

In a Django web app, a form can refer to:

• an HTML form a component of a Web page that has form controls
• a Django Form that produces an HTML form
• the structured data returned when a form is submitted
• all of the above interacting together

Django handles three distinct parts of the work involved in forms

1. preparing and restructuring data to make it ready for rendering
2. creating HTML forms for the data
3. receiving and processing submitted forms and data from the client

Most of the forms in Django should be created from models, using ModelForms, Model Fields and CSRF protection.

ModelForms are useful to:

• generate HTML
• use built-in validators approriate to each field. forms.ModelForm.is_valid()

A ModelForm maps fields from model classes to HTML form <input> elements via a the Form class.

Form methods

If the form is used to retrieve data, it should use the GET method, if it modifies data, it needs to use the POST method.

Reference: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/topics/forms/

Testing

• https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/topics/testing/
• Assertions available are from unittest and from Django’s TestCase so the full list of assertions available are:
  • https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/testing/tools/#assertions
  • https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.html#assert-methods

The preferred way to write tests in Django is using the unittest module built in to the Python standard library

In Django we subclasses from django.test.TestCase, which is a subclass of unittest.TestCase that runs each test inside a transaction to provide isolation.

Django provides a test Client to simulate a user interacting with the code at the view level. We can use it in tests.py

Related Links

• Testing tutorial https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/topics/testing/

Admin

• Edit models on the same page as a parent model with Model Inlines https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/#inlinemodeladmin-objects

References

• Two Scoops Of Django
• Official Documentation in categories https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/
• Single page with links to each doc https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/contents/

*[ORM]: Object Relational Mapping