Coder’s Eye

Yet another great use for Django is to make trivial the creation of shared tables & forms for internal projects. It is one of the most common needs in any size company, “Make me a web form to capture these data.” “Oh, and make sure to keep it locked down so that xxx dept can’t see it, and only you and I can modify it.”

Making these kind of web apps is one of the most boring tasks possible, yet they are both common and almost always poorly implemented. After all, they are just for internal use, right? And “they” rarely give you enough time to make a decent app anyway.

Well Django to the rescue. In four steps, you can have an app with far more functionality and usability than you’d ever have with some quick-hack up PHP page or ASP.

Step 1: Create the project directory and app directory

$ django_admin startproject projectbase
$ cd projectbase
$ ./manage.py startapp projectname


Step 2: Edit projectbase/settings.py

You can leave most everything default, at the simplest you can simply use a SQLite database, which requires no password or database setup. Be sure to enable the admin app, like so:

DATABASE_ENGINE = 'sqlite3'
DATABASE_NAME = '/path/to/your/project.db'
DATABASE_USER = ''
DATABASE_PASSWORD = ''
DATABASE_HOST = ''
DATABASE_PORT = ''

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'projectbase.projectname'
)

Step 3: edit projectbase/projectname. Models.py: Here you put the class or classes you want to track in your table. Here is an example taken from a simple migration tracking app I made at work.

from django.db import models

class Migration(models.Model):
    account = models.CharField(maxlength=30)
    email = models.EmailField(blank=True, null=True)
    prop = models.CharField(maxlength=30, null=True)
    requestor = models.EmailField()
    domains = models.TextField()
    target = models.CharField(maxlength=6)
    status = models.CharField(maxlength=20,
                              blank=True, null=True)
    created = models.DateField(null=True, blank=True)
    scheduled = models.DateField(null=True, blank=True)
    completed = models.DateField(null=True, blank=True)
    archived = models.DateField(null=True, blank=True)
    notes = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)

    def __repr__(self):
        return self.account

    __str__ = __repr__

    class Meta:
        get_latest_by = "created"
        ordering = ("created",)

    class Admin:
        list_display = ("account", "email", "prop",
                        "requestor", "domains",
                        "target", "status", "notes",
                        "created", "scheduled",
                        "completed", "archived")
        search_fields = ("account", "domains")

Step 4: Create the database and tables

$ manage.py syncdb


At this point, you have a full fledged system available to you. Start Django however you please, add a few users and show off. You’ll have a full app available, with sorting of tables, updating, searching, and full authentication. All in a half hour of work.

Technorati Tags: django, killer app, python