Collaborating on a web application

🗓️ Today’s Topics

• Many-to-many model relationships & queries
• Slugs
• Collaboration in a shared repo

✅ Questions to Check Your Understanding

You’ve been using Django for about a week now. Can you answer these questions? 🤔

• If you want to show one specific book in the browser, how would that work in the urls and the views?
• How do forms work in Django? You should be able to talk about form objects and how forms are handled in the views.
• Can you create new objects, find objects, and find related objects in the Django shell?
• How does Django know if a user is logged in?
• How can you implement books with multiple categories?

🎯 Project: Django Team Project

Today we’ll begin our first real team project, with a shared repo. This will require more planning, a lot of communication and coordination, and adding on some new Git skills that will let us collaborate.

You will work in a shared repo and submit one application that your team will build together. You need to discuss who will do what, but keep in mind that the work needs to be shared as equally as possible.

You have two options to choose from for this assignment. Your team should meet to discuss and decide today which one you will do.

Then, the very first thing you should do is determine what models you will need and what attributes and relationships they should have. A diagram can be very helpful here.

This assignment is due next Thursday at the end of the Phase.

Dev Teams

For this project, the first team member listed should accept the assignment and enter the name of your team. The other team members can then accept the assignment and select the repo for their team.

• Team Hufflepuff: Trent, Jeffrey, James A.
• Team Ravenclaw: Janelle, Zack, James M.
• Team Gryffindor: Jordyn, RJ, Lila
• Team Slytherin: Trey, Jason, Keanya, Jonathan

👉 Link to Django Duplex assignment

✅ Project Checklist

• Set up a new Django project from scratch. There is no starter code in the assignment repo.
• Make sure to create a .gitignore file to exclude certain files (like your .env file and db.sqlite3) from Git. You can get one specific to a Django project at gitignore.io. Just search for Django and copy and paste the text you find there into your .gitignore file. It should be placed at the root of your repo.
• Make sure to create a custom user model, following best practices. Do this before you run any other migrations. This guide may be helpful to you.
• You may want to install django-debug-toolbar, django-extenstions, and django-environ, as we have done in previous projects.

🔖 Resources

Collaboration

• GitHub Collaboration Docs
• Git Collaboration slides
• Git in VS Code Not everyone loves using git on the command line like I do. A lot of folks like using the integration in VS Code, so you might want to give it a try. This is a good place to start, but there are many other extensions that you could use as well.
• Pair Programming Guide This template for a pairing session is practical and actionable. There are other resources on this site worth a look as well.

Django

• 🍕 Tips for Using Django’s Many-to-Many Field This was on yesterday’s post too. It’s probably the best written explanation of M2M relationships out there.
• Django Docs: Related Objects Reference Working with objects that are related to each other via O2M or M2M relationships
• Django Docs: Making Queries Queries are what you need to look things up in the database
• Creating Interactive Views in Django Detailed post really breaking down views.
• Django Slug Tutorial
• Django Docs: Built-in Template Tags and Filters
• Django cheat sheet This is the same one I posted earlier in the week. If you didn’t see it then, you might be glad to see it now.
• makeareadme.com Guidance for creating your own README file
• A great example of a README and a cool project 🏒
• CRC model The Class-Responsibility-Collaborator model helps you to reason about how to design your models and relationships.

🦉 Code & Notes

• Django Music App
• Git Collaboration Slides