I wanted to do some rapid prototyping with web applications, and decided to give python and django a go. There are various tutorials out there, but none of them seem to focus on using existing database structures and views.
So this is primarily to document my own findings. If someone else finds it useful: be my guest. ;-)
So this is primarily to document my own findings. If someone else finds it useful: be my guest. ;-)
1. URL configs
These serve as the entry point to django from the web-browser's point of view. You can specify regex's and assign django views. The simplest one is probably this one:urlpatterns = patterns('',
url(r'^$', views.index, name='index')
)2. views
These views can be simple functions that return a HttpResponse, or more sophisticated classes. The simplest one is probably this one:def index(request):
return HttpResponse("Hello, world.")3. manage.py syncdb
If you start out with an empty DB, you can use django to create it for you. You just need to define the data model in django. If you use multiple models with relationships, like in the excellent django tutorial here, you might wonder about foreign keys if you use MySQL. At least if InnoDB isn't your default storage engine. Fear not, one can easily tell django to use InnoDB anyway, by adding this to your settings.py file in the DATABASES section:'OPTIONS': {
"init_command": "SET storage_engine=INNODB",