TIL/2020–11–11

In my previous TIL, I talked about what {{page}} and {{page|add:1}} meant on my .html file (see image below).

But before that let me talk to you about HTTP requests. Basically, every time you go to a URL you are making an HTTP request. And those requests would always need an HTTP response.

In my case, I have a couple of applications and I basically connected it to the config urls.py.

After setting those up, this is what I did in my views.py on my rooms application. First we are making a function that would receive the request, hence the (request), and ultimately send a response.

As you can see on the first line, I did a request.GET.get(“page”). And when I first encountered this, I also thought to myself: why is there a “GET” and a “get”?. Well the reason for the first “GET” is that it pertains to the HTTP GET pertains to a dictionary that has all the GET parameters. And the second “get()” is actually coming from the query dict itself. It is a method that the query dict has and it requires a key argument. That key argument is what will be on the URL. In my case it is “page”. I am trying to change pages (using previous and next) and populate each page with different rooms.

Next, you can see room_list where I am trying to retrieve all of the Room Models objects.

On the next line, I am making use of Django’s paginator (Don’t forget to import paginator: from django.core.paginator import Paginator)

Paginator allows us to use a number of functions with only minimal programming. Instead of assigning values to offset and limit, Paginator allows us to take a step back and relax a bit. In this example, Paginator takes up two arguments: a list (room_list, which retrieves all of my rooms as objects and an integer (10) which limits 10 rooms/objects per page.

Next we are using get_page() is one of the two methods you can use. get_page() basically returns a page object. So rooms represents 1 page.

The reason why I printed vars(rooms.paginator) is to be able to look inside and see what I could use for my .html file.

render is what connects the views.py to the .html file that you want to work on. The first argument of render takes on the HTTP request, the second argument is the path to where my .html file is, and context is used when we want to transfer python variables/elements to our .html file.

Which leads to the reason of using {{}}. And for this, I will discuss on the next blog! See you there!