exploration of django-piston -- part 2

Djangocon 09 was really food for thought and this post follow my previous post about django-piston. I found the talk from Avi Bryant about his experience building Trendly [1].

My take away of this talk was that they have a single HTML page with a lot of JS. The JS is the used to get the JSON data the JSON from the server. Unfortunately I am unable to find a link to a better description of its talk.

My last post hopefully convince you that it is easy relatively easy to create a web api to your django application [2]. This Post aims to show you how you can create a page to list and create a blogpost.

List and create a blogpost

The idea here is to reuse the web api that we have created in the previous article to build a web page. One of the interesting feature of django-piston is the decorator @validate(BlogpostForm, 'PUT'). It enables you to validate the data send to your server and it takes as input a django form. A longuer description of this feature is available here [4].

The view cannot be simpler [5] :

def create_ajaxy_post(request):
    form = BlogpostForm()
    return direct_to_template(request,
                              template='edit_ajaxy_post.html',
                              extra_context={'form':form} )

The template is using jQuery [6] which ease the ajax call and the DOM manipulation. The template [7] has a very simple structure :

{% block content %}

<h1>Ajaxy</h1>

<div id="content"></div>

<h2>Ajaxy form</h1>

<form method="POST" action="{% url posts %}" id="post_form">

    <div id="post_form_error"></div>

    {{ form.as_p }}

    <input type='submit' name='create' onclick="return send_form();" value='Create'></input>

</form>

{% endblock %}

In order to give life to this page you need some JS which will get from the JSON string of the blogposts and POST the DATA to create a new blogpost and add it to the list.

If you try to POST an empty blogpost the data will be validated on the server and the validation errors will be displayed to the user :

* content
  o This field is required.
* title
  o This field is required.

Open Issue

The validation error are returned as a pseudo xml string :

Bad Request <ul class="errorlist"><li>content<ul class="errorlist"><li>This field is required.</li></ul></li><li>title<ul class="errorlist"><li>This field is required.</li></ul></li></ul>

It will be much more convenient to get a json dict with the error. Any one has an idea on how to get this ?

Authentication is still hardcoded into the html pages. What is the best way to keep HttpBasicAuthentication to the external api that could easily be used by curl and add single sign on wiht the admin ?

The example is still very incomplete. It is missing among other things the capability to update/delete a blog post

I would be glad to read from you on how to improve this example or to get pointer of reusable application that have been built on top of django-piston.


[1] http://trendly.com/
[2] http://bitbucket.org/yml/django-piston/src/tip/examples/blogserver/README.txt
[3] http://bitbucket.org/yml/django-piston/src/72c72e0b4b7e/examples/blogserver/templates/edit_ajaxy_post.html
[4] http://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Documentation#form-validation
[5] http://bitbucket.org/yml/django-piston/src/tip/examples/blogserver/blog/views.py
[6] http://jquery.com/
[7] http://bitbucket.org/yml/django-piston/src/72c72e0b4b7e/examples/blogserver/templates/edit_ajaxy_post.html