Views, Templates and URLs

We will now create a page to display the posts made to our blog. In Django this requires creating a function called a view function that receives a request from the web browser and returns a response that the browser will display to the user.

To create the view function, open blog/views.py and add the following:

from django.http import HttpResponse


def posts(request):
    return HttpResponse('It works!')

We also need to configure which url will execute this view function. Open main/urls.py and import our views module at the top of the file below the existing import:

from blog import views

Add your posts view to the urlpatterns:

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('', views.posts),
]

The first argument to path is an empty string because we want the blog posts to appear on the home page of blog. If you wanted the url for your blog to be http://127.0.0.1:8000/myblog/ then you would write: path('myblog/', views.posts).

Visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in your browser and you should see the text from the view function.

Instead of returning plain text, we would like our view function to return HTML so we can use display headings, links, images etc. To do this we create a Django template file.

Right-click on the blog folder and select New / Directory. Name the folder templates. Right-click on templates and select New / HTML File. Name the file posts.html.

PyCharm helpfully adds some starting HTML in the new file. In the <title> tag enter My Blog and hit Enter. In the <body> tags enter:

<h1>Welcome to My Blog!</h1>

Your full HTML should look like:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>My Blog</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Welcome to My Blog!</h1>
</body>
</html>

Back in blog/views.py change the posts function to:

from django.shortcuts import render


def posts(request):
    return render(request, "posts.html")

The reason we call posts.html a template is because as well as regular HTML, it can contain special placeholder tags that Django can use to dynamically substitute in data each time a user requests the page. To demonstrate this, change the heading in posts.html to:

<h1>Welcome to {{ name }}'s Blog!</h1>

Then make your posts view function provide your name to the template:

def posts(request):
    return render(request, "posts.html", {"name": "Alice"})

Refresh the page in your web browser and your name should be substituted into the heading. We will use this same technique to pass blog posts into the template to be rendered.

Django has a large number of filters that transform data inside templates. Try changing {{ name }} to {{ name | upper }} to one such filter in action.
What happens if you forget to supply the data to the template? Make it obvious when data is missing by adding 'string_if_invalid': '<MISSING>', to the OPTIONS dictionary under TEMPLATE in main/settings.py.

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