Chapter 3: A Django view

Add the app

We add apps inside the settings.py file under the project folder, and in this case sanitation since its the name of our project. Go back to Chapter 1 to refresh your memory on how we created a project and an app directory.

To include an app in your project, you need to reference to its configuration class at the beginning of the INSTALLED_APPS list in settings file.

This enables Django know that there is a new app in town.

In order to display something for our app, we have to create a view.

Create a view

A view in Django is a collection of functions or classes inside the views.py file in an app's directory. Each function or class handles the logic that the app processes each time the user visits a different URL.

The views.py file is found under your app's directory, which is australia in this case.

Inside the australia/views.py file, insert the following code.

from django.shortcuts import render

# Create your views here.
def home(request):
    return render(request, "australia/home.html", {})

In this piece of code, you define a view function named home(). When you call this function, it'll render an HTML file named home.html.

NB: A view function takes at least one argument, request. The request object is created whenever a page loads, and it contains metadata about the page request.

Now that you’ve created the view function, you need to create the HTML template to display to the user. The render() function looks for HTML templates inside a directory called templates/ in your app directory. Since templates of different apps can have the same names, it’s also best practice to add a subdirectory with the app’s name inside the templates/ directory.

Create the templates/ directory, a subdirectory named pages/, and subsequently a file named home.html inside it.

Once you’ve created the template folders and home.html, open the HTML file in your editor and add the following lines of code:

<h1>Australia, welcome</h1>

For clarity, here is the directory structure of our australia app.

australia
├── apps.py
├── templates
│   └── australia
│       └── home.html
├── views.py

--snip--

Now that you’ve created the template that your home() view function expects, you need to tell Django when to serve the view. For this, you need to create a new route to the project.