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Django class-based views: survival guide for novices

Description

Are you a Django novice, confused by words like class-based views, URL dispatchers, HTTP requests? Are you still wondering how to use all those things to build the pages of your Web site?

Django programmers that started with versions prior to 1.3 are used to deal with views as functions, and they learned how to process even complex forms in a procedural way. From the release 1.3, Django introduced class-based views (CBVs) and ported its powerful generic views to this new paradigm (class-based generic views, or CBGVs).

This change, however, has not been harmless for Django novices: the django- users mailing list and StackOverflow are full of questions about views and classes.

This talk aims to lead Django novices to a good understanding of what class- based functions are and how they can be effectively used.

The main topics are:

  • Python classes: how OOP concepts improve the View part of Django MVT. This part aims to introduce Python classes as data processors and explains how OOP concepts like inheritance help the fast development of customized solutions.
  • URL dispatchers: how Django CBV process URL parameters. Here I discuss how Django class-based views store arguments extracted from URLs and how we can access them.
  • HTTP verbs: how Django CBV deal with GET, POST and friends. This part shows what happens to a class-based view when HTTP requests are processed and how to leverage the mechanism to customize data processing.
  • CRUD operations through Django generic class-based views. Create, Read, Update, Delete are the fundamentals operations you need on data, so it is worth learning to use and customize the powerful generic views of Django that implement them.

The target of this talk are Django novices who completed and understood the Django tutorial. Previous knowledge of the basic Python OOP syntax and concepts is preferred (classes, inheritance, method overriding, function arguments processing).

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