This graph is generated by graphviz, called by a django_extension command:
./manage.py graph_models search | dot -Tpng -o graph-db.png
See the file here .
Goal: have a many to many relationship, like between a place and a card, but specify some custom elements, like the number of copies.
See the Django doc: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/topics/db/models/#intermediary-manytomany
So, we can create a Card and a Place as usual. But to access a Card from a Place, we have to use the intermediate table, like this:
self.place.placecopies_set.get(card=mycard) # or all() or others, cf doc.
See:
Django forms are nice, but they get unusable when a select field has a lot of inputs, like when we want to select a card among the few thousands from our database.
We want some sort of autocompletion: we start typing a part of the title of the form and we are displayed a nice list of matching results.
We are using a full featured javascript framework for that purpose, but let’s discuss pure Django solutions (not even pure, they must include some javascript to make the completion).
There is django-autocomplete-light. It did the job well and was easy to setup, but we wanted more features. We want the selection of a select to affect the results of another one. For example, during the deposits creation, there is a select for the distributor and another one for searching cards. So, we want to search cards whose distributor is the one selected just above. django-autocomplete-light could do it… with a lot of javascript code. So it was the moment to choose our own javascript framework.
The app django-ajax-selects is similar but was more difficult to setup.
So now, as we use Angularjs, we have to choose an autocomplete tool in the javascript world, and our Django app must offer API endpoints. We do the autocompletion stuff with angular-ui’s typeahead.
As with Angular, there are html markup and javascript code to look at.
We define a default logger so than we can setup a logger with:
import logging
log = logging.getLogger(__name__)
and it will by default print verbose messages to the console (Django’s default is to a file). In settings.py, see the handler console and the logger “” to catch all the undefined ones.
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/topics/logging/
http://www.miximum.fr/an-effective-logging-strategy-with-django.html
Django provides tools to translate our application in different languages: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/i18n/translation/
In python code, we enclose the translatable strings in “_()” where _ is a shortcut for ugettext. The gettext family are unix tools.
In templates, we use {% trans “foo” %} tags, or blocktrans for more complicated cases.
Note:
The trans tag is in between quotes if the original string is ;)
Django also provides a facility to translate strings in our javascript code. As explained in the docs, at our base.jade template we source to a javascript script provided by Django that offers a gettext function, and we include a jsi18n url which allows Django to ask for translations.
There’s a bit of settings too.
We chose the solution to select the language by prepending its prefixe to every url (done automatically by Django).
To translate the app we need to do the above, then to create translation files (.po files), to translate everything, and to compile the translation files.
See our Makefile for translation- rules. To update all .po files (from python, html, jade and js sources), run:
make translation-files
To compile the translations and see them in the application, run:
make translations-compile
# a shortcut for django-admin compilemessages
To create a .po file for a new language, specify the -l (locale):
python manage.py makemessages -e py,html,jade -l en
See also how to translate urls, to pluralize nouns, to give context to the translators, to manually get or set the language, etc.
We have many models that store dates in fields like “created”, “closed”, etc. Be aware of the following.
In almost all cases we want a DateTimeField instead of only a DateField, because the time (hour, minute, seconds) is important too.
Our app needs to be aware of the timezone (in the settings, it is set to UTC). So to instantiate a datetime in python, don’t use python’s datetime.datetime but django’s timezone instead:
from django.utils import timezone
my_datetime = timezone.now()
Don’t forget, the client also needs to set its datetimes to UTC (when using a date picker for instance), or back to local time. In Angularjs, we can use the date filter.
Note
More information: