I have been trying to get my head around Django over the last week or two. Its slowly starting to make some sense and I am really liking it.
My goal is to replace a fairly messy excel spreadsheet with a database and frontend for my users. This would involve pulling the data out of a table, presenting it in a web tabular format, and allowing changes to be made through text fields and drop down menus, with a simple update button that will update all changes to the DB.
My question is, will the built in Django Forms functionality be the best solution? Or would I create some sort of for loop for my objects and wrap them around html form syntax in my template? I'm just not too sure how to approach the solution.
Apologies if this seems like an simple question, I just feel like there is maybe a few ways to do it but maybe there is one perfect way.
Thanks
The fastest way not to implement you own pages and to have a tabular view of your data is to use the django's built-in admin interface. It gives you sorting, filtering and search functionality and quick to start. You just need to define your models in models.py and setup the admin pages as described in the docs.
Normally the admin page is not used as a representation to users or customers but in the case you described it seems a clean and quick choice.
Exporting the excel sheet in Django and have the them rendered as text fields , is not as easy as 2 step process.
you need to know how Django works.
First you need to export the data in mysql in database using either some language or some ready made tools.
Then you need to make a Model for that table and then you can use Django admin to edit them
Related
I have a Django and i want to create CRM system, allowing users to view, add, delete and edit data in a front-end. I found nice module, named django-tables2, which allows displaying nice tables of my data:
django-tables2 turns data into HTML tables. Features:
Pagination Ordering Extendable Class based view Supports for queryset
and list data Themes
So my question is what is the best way to make front-end editing with this tables?
For example: i want to make records from table be selectable with checkboxes and then i want them to be deletable and editable, like in django built-in admin. In other words: i need some tool like django-admin but in my front-end (in my template).
So do i need to write js to handle user clicks on table records and point this actions to my urls/views or there is a better way?Hope this question will help not only my but anyone who planning to became frontend-ninja, THANKS!
I think you should take a look at Swampdragon and Angular. They might integrate nicely with django-tables2. You can always just write the table with Angular.
So im trying to use my django installation to create a dashboard a combination of all the data from the 4 other models and views. For our use of django we mainly use it for stats so it's generally just pulling numbers out onto the main index page. Right now I have my index template set up as a redirect_to_template and it goes straight to a template (since everything is still static). Im trying to figure out if im going to have to create another app and pull in all the data to a new view & model for this dashboard page, or if I should create sub-templates if that would work to pull the data.
Thanks again!
I think you're better of with pulling the data by using ajax from your dashboard, it will be a better UX when you have a lot of data to fetch. For that you can use one of the known 3rd party apps for creating REST API or change your existing views to deliver json response as well.
To help anyone that has the question in the future. I ended up importing the apps such as
from status import Alert
context['list'] = Alert.objects.filter(All My Filters Here! (link below))[:8]
Then just for loop list in the template!
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets/
Hope this is helpful to someone else!
I've been searching stack overflow and google for a solution for over an hour now, and I can't seem to find something that, in my opinion, should be easy to obtain (as it's a common use case).
I've checked this thread, and a few others, but I haven't been able to find a real, easy solution:
Django modelform: is inline adding related model possible?
Anyway, say I have a model with three related entities, two foreign keys and a many-to-many related class. Now, I have a ModelForm which displays these in comboboxes and lists, but what I need is that "+" button next to these elements (as seen in the admin interface).
I want the plus to take me to a new form, for that particular entity, allow me to submit the new information, create the database entry, take me back to my original form and have the newly added entity selected in the combobox. I'm really hoping the django ModelForm Meta class has an attribute that I can't seem to find which enables exactly this.
This isn't really a django question.
This has to do with presentation of a particular widget in an html document, and that is governed by either the HTML markup, CSS, or javascript.
Django is a server side application and is primarily responsible for creating a valid http response and receiving a valid http request (of course, there is a lot that happens in the interim and that is why django is so big) but it's not a "one toolkit to kill them all" app.
I think you want to look at bootstrap: http://getbootstrap.com/
Jquery UI: http://jqueryui.com/
Or some combination of the two.
You can also just mark up the document yourself with a stock img or something.
However, if you want to do it exactly how the admin does it, just go into django.contrib.admin and examin the code to figure out how the django developers did it. I believe they are just using Jquery UI and some manual markup to accomplish that.
I've written some python code to accomplish a task. Currently, there are 4-5 classes that I'm storing in separate files. I'd now like to change this whole thing into a database-backed web app. I've been reading tutorials on Django, and so far I get the impression that I'll need to manually specify the fields and their types for every "model" that I use. This is a little surprising to me, since I was expecting some kind of ORM capability that would just take the existing classes I've already defined, and map them onto a database somehow, in a manner abstracted away from me.
Is this not the case? Am I missing something? It looks like I need to specify all the fields and types in the file 'models.py'.
Okay, now beyond those specifics, does anyone have any general tips on the best way to migrate an object-oriented desktop application to a web application?
Thanks!
That is Django's ORM: it maps classes to tables. What else did you expect? There needs to be some way of specifying what the fields are, though, before you can use them, and that's managed through the models.Model class and the various models.Field subclasses. You can certainly use your classes as mixins in order to use the existing business logic on top of the field definitions.
If you are thinking about a database backend based web app, you have to specify what fields of the data you want to store and what type of the value you want stored.
There is an abstraction that introspects the db to convert it into the django models.py format. But I know not of any that introspects a python class and stores arbitrary data into db. How would that even work? Are the objects, now, stored as a pickle?
You're going to have to check the output, but you can have Django automatically create models from existing databases through one-time introspection.
Taken from the link below, you would set up your database in settings.py, and then call
python manage.py inspectdb
This will dump the sample models.py file to standard out for your inspection. In order to create the file, simply redirect the output
python manage.py inspectdb > models.py
See for more:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/legacy-databases/?from=olddocs#auto-generate-the-models
Pretty new to this scene and trying to find some documentation to adopt best practices. We're building a fairly large content site which will consist of various media catalogs and I'm trying to find some comparable data / architectural models so that we can get a better idea of the approach we should use using a framework we've never made use of before. Any insight / help would be greatly appreciated!
"data / architectural models so that we can get a better idea of the approach we should use using a framework we've never made use of before"
Django imposes best practices on you. You don't have a lot of choices and can't make a lot of mistakes.
MVC (while a noble aspiration) is implemented as follows:
Data is defined in "models.py" files using the Django ORM models.
urls.py file maps URL to view function. Pick your URL's wisely.
View function does all processing, making use of models and methods in models
Presentation (via HTML templates) invoked by View function. Essentially no processing can be done in presentation, just lightweight iteration and decision-making
The model is defined for you. Just stick to what Django does naturally and you'll be happy.
Architecturally, you usually have a stack like this.
Apache does two things.
serves static content directly and immediately
hands dynamic URL to Django (via mod_python, mod_wsgi or mod_fastcgi). Django apps map URL to view functions (which access to database (via ORM/model) and display via templates.
Database used by Django view functions.
The architecture is well-defined for you. Just stick to what Django does naturally and you'll be happy.
Feel free to read the Django documentation. It's excellent; perhaps the best there is.
first, forget all MVC mantra. it's important to have a good layered structure, but MVC (as defined originally) isn't one, it was a modular structure, where each GUI module is split in these tree submodules. nothing to use on the web here.
in web development, it really pays to have a layered structure, where the most important layer is the storage/modelling one, which came to be called model layer. on top of that, you need a few other layers but they're really not anything like views and controllers in the GUI world.
the Django layers are roughly:
storage/modelling: models.py, obviously. try to put most of the 'working' concepts there. all the relationships, all the operations should be implemented here.
dispatching: mostly in urls.py. here you turn your URL scheme into code paths. think of it like a big switch() statement. try hard to have readable URLs, which map into user intentions. it will help a lot to add new functionality, or new ways to do the same things (like an AJAX UI later).
gathering: mostly the view functions, both yours and the prebuilt generic views. here you simply gather all the from the models to satisfy a user request. in surprisingly many cases, it just have to pick a single model instance, and everything else can be retrieved from relationships. for these URLs, a generic view is enough.
presentation: the templates. if the view gives you the data you need, it's simple enough to turn it into a webpage. it's here where you'll thank that the model classes have good accessors to get any kind of relevant data from any given instance.
To understand django fundementals and the django take on MVC, consult the following:
http://www.djangobook.com/
As a starting point to getting your hands dirty with ...
"...trying to find some comparable data / architectural models"
Here is a quick and dirty way to reverse engineer a database to get a models.py file,
which you can then inspect to see how django would handle it.
1.) get an er diagram that closely matches your target. For example something like this
http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/product_catalogs/index.htm
2.) create an sql script from the er diagram and create the database,
I suggest Postgre, as some MySQL
table type will not have forgien key constraints, but in a pinch MySQL or SQLITE
will do
3.) create and configure a django app to use that database. Then run:
python manage.py inspectdb
This will at least give you a models.py file which you can read to see how django attempts
to model it.
Note that the inspect command is intended to be a shortcut for dealing with legacy
database when developing in django, and as such is not perfect. Be sure to read the
following before attempting this:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/django-admin/#ref-django-admin