Django Views

Quick reference

• 00:04 Okay, so we've created our first app, the resume app, but
• 00:08 when we hit reload here, nothing has really changed.
• 00:11 We still have this little rocket ship that's kind of shaking around, and
• 00:15 this is obviously not what we want.
• 00:17 So in this video, I'm going to start to talk about views.
• 00:21 And views are the first step in changing this screen right here in building
• 00:25 any sort of web page with Django.
• 00:27 So with Django, to create a web page, there's basically three things.
• 00:33 There's a view, there's a template file, and there's a URL, and
• 00:37 the URL is this thing up here, right?
• 00:39 So remember, we looked at /admin.
• 00:43 This /admin is a URL, right?
• 00:47 So, we need three things.
• 00:49 We need a URL, we need a view, and we need a template.
• 00:51 So in this video, we're going to start to look at views.
• 00:53 So let's head back over to our Sublime Text Editor and come down here,
• 00:58 I'm going to close this, and looking at our resume directory and then come down
• 01:03 here to views.py and we're going to be working in views.py an awful lot.
• 01:07 Anytime you really want to do something sort of a behind the scenes, complicated
• 01:12 with Django and a website, you're going to do it in the views.py file.
• 01:16 And the view.py file is sort of like the brains behind the scene.
• 01:19 It kind of does technical things for your webpage.
• 01:22 The template file, which we'll talk about in the next video,
• 01:25 just has the basic HTML of your webpage.
• 01:28 It's not doing anything all that interesting, but
• 01:30 the views.py file can do interesting things.
• 01:33 And we'll talk about what that means more in the next few videos, but
• 01:36 you'll notice there's some stuff in here already, and this is a comment.
• 01:40 If you're not familiar with Python comments out things with the hashtag,
• 01:45 the number sign, and that just means this doesn't get executed.
• 01:49 So we can go ahead and delete that, we don't really need that.
• 01:51 And you'll notice up here at the top it says from Django shortcuts import render.
• 01:55 And render is important, it allows us to render webpages, right?
• 01:59 So let's start to build out our first web page.
• 02:02 So we want a home page.
• 02:03 So let's create a home function.
• 02:06 So to create a function in Python, we type def to define it.
• 02:09 We want to define home and we want to pass in request, And then put a colon.
• 02:17 So, hit Enter after the colon, and you'll notice that the icon comes down and
• 02:23 it's been indented in, it's been tabbed in.
• 02:26 And now some people think that this is a bunch of spaces.
• 02:30 So I'm hitting the space key on my keyboard.
• 02:33 That's not correct.
• 02:35 This is an actual tab.
• 02:36 So if you hit the Tab key on your keyboard, it will tab this over.
• 02:40 And that's actually very important.
• 02:42 Python is tab sensitive.
• 02:44 So all of these things have to be tabbed correctly.
• 02:46 So do not use your spacebar in order to tab things over in Python ever,
• 02:50 you always want to use your Tab key.
• 02:52 So inside of here, we can return some stuff, okay?
• 02:57 And we'll talk about that in just a second.
• 02:59 First, I want to talk about this.
• 03:01 What is this request thing?
• 03:02 Well, anytime you've got a website in a web browser situation,
• 03:08 what's happening is somebody is requesting that web page.
• 03:12 So when they go to a URL, for instance local host 8000,
• 03:16 that's sending a request to the backend.
• 03:19 And this is our backend, right?
• 03:22 So we want to pass that request into this function.
• 03:25 So somebody is saying, hey, give me the home page, I'm requesting it.
• 03:29 So we pass that request into this function, and
• 03:33 we return, we type in render because we want to render a web page, and
• 03:38 renders a function, and inside of there, we want to pass that request.
• 03:43 So we type request, comma, and then quotation marks.
• 03:47 And these can be either double quotation marks or single quotation marks.
• 03:50 I'm going to use single.
• 03:52 We want to say where do we want to send this request?
• 03:54 Well, we want to send it to home.html.
• 03:57 Now we haven't created home.html yet, but we will soon.
• 04:00 And you want to put in another comma, and then you want to put an opening and
• 04:03 closing squiggly brackets.
• 04:05 And what these brackets are, is something called a context variable.
• 04:09 And this allows us to pass things into our webpage, and
• 04:11 we'll talk about that later on.
• 04:13 But for now, we can just leave this blank with an opening and
• 04:16 a closing squiggly tag.
• 04:17 So this is really all there is to it at its minimum,
• 04:20 this is really all you need to create at least a view for a web page.
• 04:25 And if we want to create another web page, for instance and about page,
• 04:30 we could just copy this whole thing and just rename it something else.
• 04:34 So if we want to call it about,
• 04:37 if we want that to point to about.html, we can do that.
• 04:42 I'm going to go ahead and delete this for now, just to keep things simple.
• 04:44 We'll probably add that back in later.
• 04:46 But that's as easy as it is to create new webpages.
• 04:49 So like I said at the beginning of this video,
• 04:51 creating a web page is really a three step process, you have to have a view,
• 04:55 you have to have a template, and you have to have a URL.
• 04:58 So in the next video, we'll go ahead and create a template,
• 05:01 I'll show you how to do that.
• 05:03 And that'll be in the next video.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.