The Dumb Way to Do Database Queries in Views

Just as Chapter 3 detailed a dumb way to produce output within a view (by hard-coding the text directly within the view), theres a dumb way to retrieve data from a database in a view. Its simple: just use any existing Python library to execute an SQL query and do something with the results.

In this example view, we use the MySQLdb library (available at http://www.djangoproject.com/r/python-mysql/) to connect to a MySQL database, retrieve some records, and feed them to a template for display as a Web page:

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
import MySQLdb

def book_list(request):
    db = MySQLdb.connect(user='me', db='mydb', passwd='secret', host='localhost')
    cursor = db.cursor()
    cursor.execute('SELECT name FROM books ORDER BY name')
    names = [row[0] for row in cursor.fetchall()]
    db.close()
    return render_to_response('book_list.html', {'names': names})

This approach works, but some problems should jump out at you immediately:

• Were hard-coding the database connection parameters. Ideally, these parameters would be stored in the Django configuration.

• Were having to write a fair bit of boilerplate code: creating a connection, creating a cursor, executing a statement, and closing the connection. Ideally, all wed have to do is specify which results we wanted.

• It ties us to MySQL. If, down the road, we switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL, well have to use a different database adapter (e.g., psycopg rather than MySQLdb ), alter the connection parameters, and depending on the nature of the SQL statement possibly rewrite the SQL. Ideally, the database server were using would be abstracted, so that a database server change could be made in a single place.

As you might expect, Djangos database layer aims to solve these problems. Heres a sneak preview of how the previous view can be rewritten using Djangos database API:

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from mysite.books.models import Book

def book_list(request):
    books = Book.objects.order_by('name')
    return render_to_response('book_list.html', {'books': books})

Well explain this code a little later in the chapter. For now, just get a feel for how it looks.

The MTV Development Pattern

Before we delve into any more code, lets take a moment to consider the overall design of a database-driven Django Web application.

As we mentioned in previous chapters, Django is designed to encourage loose coupling and strict separation between pieces of an application. If you follow this philosophy, its easy to make changes to one particular piece of the application without affecting the other pieces. In view functions, for instance, we discussed the importance of separating the business logic from the presentation logic by using a template system. With the database layer, were applying that same philosophy to data access logic.

Those three pieces together data access logic, business logic, and presentation logic comprise a concept thats sometimes called the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern of software architecture. In this pattern, Model refers to the data access layer, View refers to the part of the system that selects what to display and how to display it, and Controller refers to the part of the system that decides which view to use, depending on user input, accessing the model as needed.

Why the Acronym?

The goal of explicitly defining patterns such as MVC is mostly to streamline communication among developers. Instead of having to tell your coworkers, Lets make an abstraction of the data access, then lets have a separate layer that handles data display, and lets put a layer in the middle that regulates this, you can take advantage of a shared vocabulary and say, Lets use the MVC pattern here.

Django follows this MVC pattern closely enough that it can be called an MVC framework. Heres roughly how the M, V, and C break down in Django:

• M , the data-access portion, is handled by Djangos database layer, which is described in this chapter.

• V , the portion that selects which data to display and how to display it, is handled by views and templates.

• C , the portion that delegates to a view depending on user input, is handled by the framework itself by following your URLconf and calling the appropriate Python function for the given URL.

Because the C is handled by the framework itself and most of the excitement in Django happens in models, templates, and views, Django has been referred to as an MTV framework . In the MTV development pattern,

• M stands for Model, the data access layer. This layer contains anything and everything about the data: how to access it, how to validate it, which behaviors it has, and the relationships between the data.

• T stands for Template, the presentation layer. This layer contains presentation-related decisions: how something should be displayed on a Web page or other type of document.

• V stands for View, the business logic layer. This layer contains the logic that access the model and defers to the appropriate template(s). You can think of it as the bridge between models and templates.

If youre familiar with other MVC Web-development frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails, you may consider Django views to be the controllers and Django templates to be the views. This is an unfortunate confusion brought about by differing interpretations of MVC. In Djangos interpretation of MVC, the view describes the data that gets presented to the user; its not necessarily just how the data looks, but which data is presented. In contrast, Ruby on Rails and similar frameworks suggest that the controllers job includes deciding which data gets presented to the user, whereas the view is strictly how the data looks, not which data is presented.

Neither interpretation is more correct than the other. The important thing is to understand the underlying concepts.

Configuring the Database

With all of that philosophy in mind, lets start exploring Djangos database layer. First, we need to take care of some initial configuration: we need to tell Django which database server to use and how to connect to it.

Well assume youve set up a database server, activated it, and created a database within it (e.g., using a CREATE DATABASE statement). SQLite is a special case; in that case, theres no database to create, because SQLite uses standalone files on the filesystem to store its data.

As with TEMPLATE_DIRS in the previous chapter, database configuration lives in the Django settings file, called settings.py by default. Edit that file and look for the database settings:

DATABASE_ENGINE = ''
DATABASE_NAME = ''
DATABASE_USER = ''
DATABASE_PASSWORD = ''
DATABASE_HOST = ''
DATABASE_PORT = ''

Heres a rundown of each setting.

DATABASE_ENGINE tells Django which database engine to use. If youre using a database with Django, DATABASE_ENGINE must be set to one of the strings shown in Table 5-1.

Table 5-1. Database Engine Settings

Setting	Database	Required Adapter
postgresql	PostgreSQL	psycopg version 1.x, http://www.djangoproject.com/r/python-pgsql/1/.
postgresql_psycopg2	PostgreSQL	psycopg version 2.x, http://www.djangoproject.com/r/python-pgsql/.
mysql	MySQL	MySQLdb , http://www.djangoproject.com/r/python-mysql/.
sqlite3	SQLite	No adapter needed if using Python 2.5+. Otherwise, pysqlite , http://www.djangoproject.com/r/python-sqlite/.
ado_mssql	Microsoft SQL Server	adodbapi version 2.0.1+, http://www.djangoproject.com/r/python-ado/.
oracle	Oracle	cx_Oracle , http://www.djangoproject.com/r/python-oracle/.

Note that for whichever database back-end you use, youll need to download and install the appropriate database adapter. Each one is available for free on the Web; just follow the links in the Required Adapter column in Table 5-1.

DATABASE_NAME tells Django the name of your database. If youre using SQLite, specify the full filesystem path to the database file on your filesystem (e.g., '/home/django/mydata.db' ).

DATABASE_USER tells Django which username to use when connecting to your database. If youre using SQLite, leave this blank.

DATABASE_PASSWORD tells Django which password to use when connecting to your database. If youre using SQLite or have an empty password, leave this blank.

DATABASE_HOST tells Django which host to use when connecting to your database. If your database is on the same computer as your Django installation (i.e., localhost), leave this blank. If youre using SQLite, leave this blank.

MySQL is a special case here. If this value starts with a forward slash ('/' ) and youre using MySQL, MySQL will connect via a Unix socket to the specified socket, for example:

DATABASE_HOST = '/var/run/mysql'

If youre using MySQL and this value doesnt start with a forward slash, then this value is assumed to be the host.

DATABASE_PORT tells Django which port to use when connecting to your database. If youre using SQLite, leave this blank. Otherwise, if you leave this blank, the underlying database adapter will use whichever port is default for your given database server. In most cases, the default port is fine, so you can leave this blank.

Once youve entered those settings, test your configuration. First, from within the mysite project directory you created in Chapter 2, run the command python manage.py shell .

Youll notice this starts a Python interactive interpreter. Looks can be deceiving, though! Theres an important difference between running the command python manage.py shell within your Django project directory and the more generic python . The latter is the basic Python shell, but the former tells Django which settings file to use before it starts the shell. This is a key requirement for doing database queries: Django needs to know which settings file to use in order to get your database connection information.

Behind the scenes, python manage.py shell simply assumes that your settings file is in the same directory as manage.py . There are other ways to tell Django which settings module to use, but these subtleties will be covered later. For now, use python manage.py shell whenever you need to drop into the Python interpreter to do Django-specific tinkering.

Once youve entered the shell, type these commands to test your database configuration:

>>> from django.db import connection
>>> cursor = connection.cursor()

If nothing happens, then your database is configured properly. Otherwise, check the error message for clues about whats wrong. Table 5-2 shows some common errors.

Your First App

Now that youve verified the connection is working, its time to create a Django app a bundle of Django code, including models and views, that lives together in a single Python package and represents a full Django application.

Its worth explaining the terminology here, because this tends to trip up beginners. Wed already created a project , in Chapter 2, so whats the difference between a project and an app ? The difference is that of configuration vs. code:

A project is an instance of a certain set of Django apps, plus the configuration for those apps.

Technically, the only requirement of a project is that it supplies a settings file, which defines the database connection information, the list of installed apps, the TEMPLATE_DIRS , and so forth.

An app is a portable set of Django functionality, usually including models and views, that lives together in a single Python package.

For example, Django comes with a number of apps, such as a commenting system and an automatic admin interface. A key thing to note about these apps is that theyre portable and reusable across multiple projects.

There are very few hard-and-fast rules about how you fit your Django code into this scheme; its flexible. If youre building a simple Web site, you may use only a single app. If youre building a complex Web site with several unrelated pieces such as an e-commerce system and a message board, youll probably want to split those into separate apps so that youll be able to reuse them individually in the future.

Indeed, you dont necessarily need to create apps at all, as evidenced by the example view functions weve created so far in this book. In those cases, we simply created a file called views.py , filled it with view functions, and pointed our URLconf at those functions. No apps were needed.

However, theres one requirement regarding the app convention: if youre using Djangos database layer (models), you must create a Django app. Models must live within apps. Thus, in order to start writing our models, well need to create a new app.

Within the mysite project directory you created in Chapter 2, type this command to create a new app named books:

python manage.py startapp books

This command does not produce any output, but it does create a books directory within the mysite directory. Lets look at the contents of that directory:

books/
    __init__.py
    models.py
    views.py

These files will contain the models and views for this app.

Have a look at models.py and views.py in your favorite text editor. Both files are empty, except for an import in models.py . This is the blank slate for your Django app.

Defining Models in Python

As we discussed earlier in this chapter, the M in MTV stands for Model. A Django model is a description of the data in your database, represented as Python code. Its your data layout the equivalent of your SQL CREATE TABLE statements except its in Python instead of SQL, and it includes more than just database column definitions. Django uses a model to execute SQL code behind the scenes and return convenient Python data structures representing the rows in your database tables. Django also uses models to represent higher-level concepts that SQL cant necessarily handle.

If youre familiar with databases, your immediate thought might be, Isnt it redundant to define data models in Python and in SQL? Django works the way it does for several reasons:

Introspection requires overhead and is imperfect. In order to provide convenient data-access APIs, Django needs to know the database layout somehow , and there are two ways of accomplishing this. The first way would be to explicitly describe the data in Python, and the second way would be to introspect the database at runtime to determine the data models.

This second way seems cleaner, because the metadata about your tables lives in only one place, but it introduces a few problems. First, introspecting a database at runtime obviously requires overhead. If the framework had to introspect the database each time it processed a request, or even when the Web server was initialized, this would incur an unacceptable level of overhead. (While some believe that level of overhead is acceptable, Djangos developers aim to trim as much framework overhead as possible, and this approach has succeeded in making Django faster than its high-level framework competitors in benchmarks.) Second, some databases, notably older versions of MySQL, do not store sufficient metadata for accurate and complete introspection.

Writing Python is fun, and keeping everything in Python limits the number of times your brain has to do a context switch. It helps productivity if you keep yourself in a single programming environment/mentality for as long as possible. Having to write SQL, then Python, and then SQL again is disruptive.

Having data models stored as code rather than in your database makes it easier to keep your models under version control. This way, you can easily keep track of changes to your data layouts.

SQL allows for only a certain level of metadata about a data layout. Most database systems, for example, do not provide a specialized data type for representing email addresses or URLs. Django models do. The advantage of higher-level data types is higher productivity and more reusable code.

SQL is inconsistent across database platforms. If youre distributing a Web application, for example, its much more pragmatic to distribute a Python module that describes your data layout than separate sets of CREATE TABLE statements for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite.

A drawback of this approach, however, is that its possible for the Python code to get out of sync with whats actually in the database. If you make changes to a Django model, youll need to make the same changes inside your database to keep your database consistent with the model. Well detail some strategies for handling this problem later in this chapter.

Finally, we should note that Django includes a utility that can generate models by introspecting an existing database. This is useful for quickly getting up and running with legacy data.

Your First Model

As an ongoing example in this chapter and the next chapter, well focus on a basic book/author/publisher data layout. We use this as our example because the conceptual relationships between books, authors, and publishers are well known, and this is a common data layout used in introductory SQL textbooks. Youre also reading a book that was written by authors and produced by a publisher!

Well suppose the following concepts, fields, and relationships:

• An author has a salutation (e.g., Mr. or Mrs.), a first name, a last name, an email address, and a headshot photo.

• A publisher has a name, a street address, a city, a state/province, a country, and a Web site.

• A book has a title and a publication date. It also has one or more authors (a many-to-many relationship with authors) and a single publisher (a one-to-many relationship aka foreign key to publishers).

The first step in using this database layout with Django is to express it as Python code. In the models.py file that was created by the startapp command, enter the following:

from django.db import models

class Publisher(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(maxlength=30)
    address = models.CharField(maxlength=50)
    city = models.CharField(maxlength=60)
    state_province = models.CharField(maxlength=30)
    country = models.CharField(maxlength=50)
    website = models.URLField()

class Author(models.Model):
    salutation = models.CharField(maxlength=10)
    first_name = models.CharField(maxlength=30)
    last_name = models.CharField(maxlength=40)
    email = models.EmailField()
    headshot = models.ImageField(upload_to='/tmp')

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(maxlength=100)
    authors = models.ManyToManyField(Author)
    publisher = models.ForeignKey(Publisher)
    publication_date = models.DateField()

Lets quickly examine this code to cover the basics. The first thing to notice is that each model is represented by a Python class that is a subclass of django.db.models.Model . The parent class, Model , contains all the machinery necessary to make these objects capable of interacting with a database and that leaves our models responsible solely for defining their fields, in a nice and compact syntax. Believe it or not, this is all the code we need to write to have basic data access with Django.

Each model generally corresponds to a single database table, and each attribute on a model generally corresponds to a column in that database table. The attribute name corresponds to the columns name, and the type of field (e.g., CharField ) corresponds to the database column type (e.g., varchar ). For example, the Publisher model is equivalent to the following table (assuming PostgreSQL CREATE TABLE syntax):

CREATE TABLE "books_publisher" (
    "id" serial NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    "name" varchar(30) NOT NULL,
    "address" varchar(50) NOT NULL,
    "city" varchar(60) NOT NULL,
    "state_province" varchar(30) NOT NULL,
    "country" varchar(50) NOT NULL,
    "website" varchar(200) NOT NULL
);

Indeed, Django can generate that CREATE TABLE statement automatically, as well show in a moment.

The exception to the one-class-per-database-table rule is the case of many-to-many relationships. In our example models, Book has a ManyToManyField called authors . This designates that a book has one or many authors, but the Book database table doesnt get an authors column. Rather, Django creates an additional table a many-to-many join table that handles the mapping of books to authors.

For a full list of field types and model syntax options, see Appendix B.

Finally, note we havent explicitly defined a primary key in any of these models. Unless you instruct it otherwise, Django automatically gives every model an integer primary key field called id . Each Django model is required to have a single-column primary key.

Installing the Model

Weve written the code; now lets create the tables in our database. In order to do that, the first step is to activate these models in our Django project. We do that by adding the books app to the list of installed apps in the settings file.

Edit the settings.py file again, and look for the INSTALLED_APPS setting. INSTALLED_APPS tells Django which apps are activated for a given project. By default, it looks something like this:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
)

Temporarily comment out all four of those strings by putting a hash character (# ) in front of them. (Theyre included by default as a common-case convenience, but well activate and discuss them later.) While youre at it, modify the default MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES and TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS settings. These depend on some of the apps we just commented out. Then, add 'mysite.books' to the INSTALLED_APPS list, so the setting ends up looking like this:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
#    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
#    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
#    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
#    'django.middleware.doc.XViewMiddleware',
)

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = ()
#...

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    #'django.contrib.auth',
    #'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    #'django.contrib.sessions',
    #'django.contrib.sites',
    'mysite.books',
)

(As were dealing with a single-element tuple here, dont forget the trailing comma. By the way, this books authors prefer to put a comma after every element of a tuple, regardless of whether the tuple has only a single element. This avoids the issue of forgetting commas, and theres no penalty for using that extra comma.)

'mysite.books' refers to the books app were working on. Each app in INSTALLED_APPS is represented by its full Python path that is, the path of packages, separated by dots, leading to the app package.

Now that the Django app has been activated in the settings file, we can create the database tables in our database. First, lets validate the models by running this command:

python manage.py validate

The validate command checks whether your models syntax and logic are correct. If all is well, youll see the message 0 errors found . If you dont, make sure you typed in the model code correctly. The error output should give you helpful information about what was wrong with the code.

Any time you think you have problems with your models, run python manage.py validate . It tends to catch all the common model problems.

If your models are valid, run the following command for Django to generate CREATE TABLE statements for your models in the books app (with colorful syntax highlighting available if youre using Unix):

python manage.py sqlall books

In this command, books is the name of the app. Its what you specified when you ran the command manage.py startapp . When you run the command, you should see something like this:

BEGIN;
CREATE TABLE "books_publisher" (
    "id" serial NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    "name" varchar(30) NOT NULL,
    "address" varchar(50) NOT NULL,
    "city" varchar(60) NOT NULL,
    "state_province" varchar(30) NOT NULL,
    "country" varchar(50) NOT NULL,
    "website" varchar(200) NOT NULL
);
CREATE TABLE "books_book" (
    "id" serial NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    "title" varchar(100) NOT NULL,
    "publisher_id" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "books_publisher" ("id"),
    "publication_date" date NOT NULL
);
CREATE TABLE "books_author" (
    "id" serial NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    "salutation" varchar(10) NOT NULL,
    "first_name" varchar(30) NOT NULL,
    "last_name" varchar(40) NOT NULL,
    "email" varchar(75) NOT NULL,
    "headshot" varchar(100) NOT NULL
);
CREATE TABLE "books_book_authors" (
    "id" serial NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    "book_id" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "books_book" ("id"),
    "author_id" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "books_author" ("id"),
    UNIQUE ("book_id", "author_id")
);
CREATE INDEX books_book_publisher_id ON "books_book" ("publisher_id");
COMMIT;

Note the following:

• Table names are automatically generated by combining the name of the app (books ) and the lowercase name of the model (publisher , book , and author ). You can override this behavior, as detailed in Appendix B.

• As we mentioned earlier, Django adds a primary key for each table automatically the id fields. You can override this, too.

• By convention, Django appends "_id" to the foreign key field name. As you might have guessed, you can override this behavior, too.

• The foreign key relationship is made explicit by a REFERENCES statement.

• These CREATE TABLE statements are tailored to the database youre using, so database-specific field types such as auto_increment (MySQL), serial (PostgreSQL), or integer primary key (SQLite) are handled for you automatically. The same goes for quoting of column names (e.g., using double quotes or single quotes). This example output is in PostgreSQL syntax.

The sqlall command doesnt actually create the tables or otherwise touch your database it just prints output to the screen so you can see what SQL Django would execute if you asked it. If you wanted to, you could copy and paste this SQL into your database client, or use Unix pipes to pass it directly. However, Django provides an easier way of committing the SQL to the database. Run the syncdb command, like so:

python manage.py syncdb

Youll see something like this:

Creating table books_publisher
Creating table books_book
Creating table books_author
Installing index for books.Book model

The syncdb command is a simple sync of your models to your database. It looks at all of the models in each app in your INSTALLED_APPS setting, checks the database to see whether the appropriate tables exist yet, and creates the tables if they dont yet exist. Note that syncdb does not sync changes in models or deletions of models; if you make a change to a model or delete a model, and you want to update the database, syncdb will not handle that. (More on this later.)

If you run python manage.py syncdb again, nothing happens, because you havent added any models to the books app or added any apps to INSTALLED_APPS . Ergo, its always safe to run python manage.py syncdb it wont clobber things.

If youre interested, take a moment to dive into your database servers command-line client and see the database tables Django created. You can manually run the command-line client (e.g., psql for PostgreSQL) or you can run the command python manage.py dbshell , which will figure out which command-line client to run, depending on your DATABASE_SERVER setting. The latter is almost always more convenient.

Basic Data Access

Once youve created a model, Django automatically provides a high-level Python API for working with those models. Try it out by running python manage.py shell and typing the following:

>>> from books.models import Publisher
>>> p1 = Publisher(name='Addison-Wesley', address='75 Arlington Street',
...     city='Boston', state_province='MA', country='U.S.A.',
...     website='http://www.apress.com/')
>>> p1.save()
>>> p2 = Publisher(name="O'Reilly", address='10 Fawcett St.',
...     city='Cambridge', state_province='MA', country='U.S.A.',
...     website='http://www.oreilly.com/')
>>> p2.save()
>>> publisher_list = Publisher.objects.all()
>>> publisher_list
[<Publisher: Publisher object>, <Publisher: Publisher object>]

These few lines of code accomplish quite a bit. Here are the highlights:

• To create an object, just import the appropriate model class and instantiate it by passing in values for each field.

• To save the object to the database, call the save() method on the object. Behind the scenes, Django executes an SQL INSERT statement here.

• To retrieve objects from the database, use the attribute Publisher.objects . Fetch a list of all Publisher objects in the database with the statement Publisher.objects.all() . Behind the scenes, Django executes an SQL SELECT statement here.

Naturally, you can do quite a lot with the Django database API but first, lets take care of a small annoyance.

Adding Model String Representations

When we printed out the list of publishers, all we got was this unhelpful display that makes it difficult to tell the Publisher objects apart:

[<Publisher: Publisher object>, <Publisher: Publisher object>]

We can fix this easily by adding a method called __str__() to our Publisher object. A __str__() method tells Python how to display the string representation of an object. You can see this in action by adding a __str__() method to the three models:

from django.db import models

class Publisher(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(maxlength=30)
    address = models.CharField(maxlength=50)
    city = models.CharField(maxlength=60)
    state_province = models.CharField(maxlength=30)
    country = models.CharField(maxlength=50)
    website = models.URLField()

    **def __str__(self):**
        **return self.name**

class Author(models.Model):
    salutation = models.CharField(maxlength=10)
    first_name = models.CharField(maxlength=30)
    last_name = models.CharField(maxlength=40)
    email = models.EmailField()
    headshot = models.ImageField(upload_to='/tmp')

    **def __str__(self):**
        **return '%s %s' % (self.first_name, self.last_name)**

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(maxlength=100)
    authors = models.ManyToManyField(Author)
    publisher = models.ForeignKey(Publisher)
    publication_date = models.DateField()

    **def __str__(self):**
        **return self.title**

As you can see, a __str__() method can do whatever it needs to do in order to return a string representation. Here, the __str__() methods for Publisher and Book simply return the objects name and title, respectively, but the __str__() for Author is slightly more complex it pieces together the first_name and last_name fields. The only requirement for __str__() is that it return a string. If __str__() doesnt return a string if it returns, say, an integer then Python will raise a TypeError with a message like "__str__ returned non-string" .

For the changes to take effect, exit out of the Python shell and enter it again with python manage.py shell . (This is the simplest way to make code changes take effect.) Now the list of Publisher objects is much easier to understand:

>>> from books.models import Publisher
>>> publisher_list = Publisher.objects.all()
>>> publisher_list
[<Publisher: Addison-Wesley>, <Publisher: O'Reilly>]

Make sure any model you define has a __str__() method not only for your own convenience when using the interactive interpreter, but also because Django uses the output of __str__() in several places when it needs to display objects.

Finally, note that __str__() is a good example of adding behavior to models. A Django model describes more than the database table layout for an object; it also describes any functionality that object knows how to do. __str__() is one example of such functionality a model knows how to display itself.

Inserting and Updating Data

Youve already seen this done: to insert a row into your database, first create an instance of your model using keyword arguments, like so:

>>> p = Publisher(name='Apress',
...         address='2855 Telegraph Ave.',
...         city='Berkeley',
...         state_province='CA',
...         country='U.S.A.',
...         website='http://www.apress.com/')

This act of instantiating a model class does not touch the database.

To save the record into the database (i.e., to perform the SQL INSERT statement), call the objects save() method:

>>> p.save()

In SQL, this can roughly be translated into the following:

INSERT INTO book_publisher
    (name, address, city, state_province, country, website)
VALUES
    ('Apress', '2855 Telegraph Ave.', 'Berkeley', 'CA',
     'U.S.A.', 'http://www.apress.com/');

Because the Publisher model uses an autoincrementing primary key id , the initial call to save() does one more thing: it calculates the primary key value for the record and sets it to the id attribute on the instance:

>>> p.id
52    # this will differ based on your own data

Subsequent calls to save() will save the record in place, without creating a new record (i.e., performing an SQL UPDATE statement instead of an INSERT ):

>>> p.name = 'Apress Publishing'
>>> p.save()

The preceding save() statement will result in roughly the following SQL:

UPDATE book_publisher SET
    name = 'Apress Publishing',
    address = '2855 Telegraph Ave.',
    city = 'Berkeley',
    state_province = 'CA',
    country = 'U.S.A.',
    website = 'http://www.apress.com'
WHERE id = 52;

Selecting Objects

Creating and updating data sure is fun, but it is also useless without a way to sift through that data. Weve already seen a way to look up all the data for a certain model:

>>> Publisher.objects.all()
[<Publisher: Addison-Wesley>, <Publisher: O'Reilly>, <Publisher: Apress Publishing>]

This roughly translates to this SQL:

SELECT
    id, name, address, city, state_province, country, website
FROM book_publisher;

Note

Notice that Django doesnt use SELECT * when looking up data and instead lists all fields explicitly. This is by design: in certain circumstances SELECT * can be slower, and (more important) listing fields more closely follows one tenet of the Zen of Python: Explicit is better than implicit.

For more on the Zen of Python, try typing import this at a Python prompt.

Lets take a close look at each part of this Publisher.objects.all() line:

First, we have the model we defined, Publisher . No surprise here: when you want to look up data, you use the model for that data.

Next, we have this objects business. Technically, this is a manager . Managers are discussed in detail in Appendix B. For now, all you need to know is that managers take care of all table-level operations on data including, most important, data lookup.

All models automatically get a objects manager; youll use it any time you want to look up model instances.

Finally, we have all() . This is a method on the objects manager that returns all the rows in the database. Though this object looks like a list, its actually a QuerySet an object that represents some set of rows from the database. Appendix C deals with QuerySets in detail. For the rest of this chapter, well just treat them like the lists they emulate.

Any database lookup is going to follow this general pattern well call methods on the manager attached to the model we want to query against.

>>> Publisher.objects.filter(name="Apress Publishing")
[<Publisher: Apress Publishing>]

SELECT
    id, name, address, city, state_province, country, website
FROM book_publisher
WHERE name = 'Apress Publishing';

>>> Publisher.objects.filter(country="U.S.A.", state_province="CA")
[<Publisher: Apress Publishing>]

SELECT
    id, name, address, city, state_province, country, website
FROM book_publisher
WHERE country = 'U.S.A.' AND state_province = 'CA';

>>> Publisher.objects.filter(name__contains="press")
[<Publisher: Apress Publishing>]

SELECT
    id, name, address, city, state_province, country, website
FROM book_publisher
WHERE name LIKE '%press%';

>>> Publisher.objects.get(name="Apress Publishing")
<Publisher: Apress Publishing>

>>> Publisher.objects.get(country="U.S.A.")
Traceback (most recent call last):
    ...
AssertionError: get() returned more than one Publisher -- it returned 2!

>>> Publisher.objects.get(name="Penguin")
Traceback (most recent call last):
    ...
DoesNotExist: Publisher matching query does not exist.

>>> Publisher.objects.order_by("name")
[<Publisher: Apress Publishing>, <Publisher: Addison-Wesley>, <Publisher: O'Reilly>]

SELECT
    id, name, address, city, state_province, country, website
FROM book_publisher
ORDER BY name;

>>> Publisher.objects.order_by("address")
[<Publisher: O'Reilly>, <Publisher: Apress Publishing>, <Publisher: Addison-Wesley>]

>>> Publisher.objects.order_by("state_province")
[<Publisher: Apress Publishing>, <Publisher: Addison-Wesley>, <Publisher: O'Reilly>]

>>> Publisher.objects.order_by("state_provice", "address")
 [<Publisher: Apress Publishing>, <Publisher: O'Reilly>, <Publisher: Addison-Wesley>]

>>> Publisher.objects.order_by("-name")
[<Publisher: O'Reilly>, <Publisher: Apress Publishing>, <Publisher: Addison-Wesley>]

class Publisher(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(maxlength=30)
    address = models.CharField(maxlength=50)
    city = models.CharField(maxlength=60)
    state_province = models.CharField(maxlength=30)
    country = models.CharField(maxlength=50)
    website = models.URLField()

    def __str__(self):
        return self.name

    **class Meta:**
        **ordering = ["name"]**

>>> Publisher.objects.filter(country="U.S.A.").order_by("-name")
[<Publisher: O'Reilly>, <Publisher: Apress Publishing>, <Publisher: Addison-Wesley>]

SELECT
    id, name, address, city, state_province, country, website
FROM book_publisher
WHERE country = 'U.S.A'
ORDER BY name DESC;

>>> Publisher.objects.all()[0]
<Publisher: Addison-Wesley>

SELECT
    id, name, address, city, state_province, country, website
FROM book_publisher
ORDER BY name
LIMIT 1;

Deleting Objects

To delete objects, simply call the delete() method on your object:

>>> p = Publisher.objects.get(name="Addison-Wesley")
>>> p.delete()
>>> Publisher.objects.all()
[<Publisher: Apress Publishing>, <Publisher: O'Reilly>]

You can also delete objects in bulk by calling delete() on the result of some lookup:

>>> publishers = Publisher.objects.all()
>>> publishers.delete()
>>> Publisher.objects.all()
[]

Note

Deletions are permanent , so be careful! In fact, its usually a good idea to avoid deleting objects unless you absolutely have to relational databases dont do undo so well, and restoring from backups is painful.

Its often a good idea to add active flags to your data models. You can look up only active objects, and simply set the active field to False instead of deleting the object. Then, if you realize youve made a mistake, you can simply flip the flag back.

Making Changes to a Database Schema

When we introduced the syncdb command earlier in this chapter, we noted that syncdb merely creates tables that dont yet exist in your database it does not sync changes in models or perform deletions of models. If you add or change a models field, or if you delete a model, youll need to make the change in your database manually. This section explains how to do that.

When dealing with schema changes, its important to keep a few things in mind about how Djangos database layer works:

• Django will complain loudly if a model contains a field that has not yet been created in the database table. This will cause an error the first time you use the Django database API to query the given table (i.e., it will happen at code execution time, not at compilation time).

• Django does not care if a database table contains columns that are not defined in the model.

• Django does not care if a database contains a table that is not represented by a model.

Making schema changes is a matter of changing the various pieces the Python code and the database itself in the right order.

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(maxlength=100)
    authors = models.ManyToManyField(Author)
    publisher = models.ForeignKey(Publisher)
    publication_date = models.DateField()
    **num_pages = models.IntegerField(blank=True, null=True)**

    def __str__(self):
        return self.title

CREATE TABLE "books_book" (
    "id" serial NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    "title" varchar(100) NOT NULL,
    "publisher_id" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "books_publisher" ("id"),
    "publication_date" date NOT NULL,
    "num_pages" integer NULL
);

"num_pages" integer NULL

ALTER TABLE books_book ADD COLUMN num_pages integer;

BEGIN;
ALTER TABLE books_book ADD COLUMN num_pages integer;
UPDATE books_book SET num_pages=0;
ALTER TABLE books_book ALTER COLUMN num_pages SET NOT NULL;
COMMIT;

>>> from mysite.books.models import Book
>>> Book.objects.all()[:5]

ALTER TABLE books_book DROP COLUMN num_pages;

DROP TABLE books_books_publishers;

DROP TABLE books_book;

Whats Next?

Once youve defined your models, the next step is to populate your database with data. You might have legacy data, in which case Chapter 16 will give you advice about integrating with legacy databases. You might rely on site users to supply your data, in which case Chapter 7 will teach you how to process user-submitted form data.

But in some cases, you or your team might need to enter data manually, in which case it would be helpful to have a Web-based interface for entering and managing data. The next chapter covers Djangos admin interface, which exists precisely for that reason.