Writing your first Fastview app

In this tutorial we’ll build on the official Django tutorial and walk you through building a fully-featured poll app which will consist of a public site where:

• members of the public can view polls and vote in them

• users can create and administrate their own polls

• staff can administrate all polls

We will assume you’ve already followed the official tutorial, and have a basic understanding of class-based views.

If you want to skip ahead, the completed project is available on github as the Fastview example project.

Prepare your project

We’ll assume that you have just finished part 7 of the official tutorial, and have the polls app in front of you. You have django installed. You’ve also given all your poll templates the base template templates/base_site.html using a content block. We’re also going to change Question.was_published_recently to use the past 30 days.

You can get a copy of this starting point from from https://github.com/radiac/django-tutorial-starter.

If you’d prefer to just read along we’ll cover everything as we go. We’re starting with these models:

polls/models.py

import datetime

from django.contrib import admin
from django.db import models
from django.utils import timezone


class Question(models.Model):
    question_text = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField("date published")

    def __str__(self):
        return self.question_text

    @admin.display(boolean=True, ordering="pub_date", description="Published recently?")
    def was_published_recently(self):
        now = timezone.now()
        return now - datetime.timedelta(days=1) <= self.pub_date <= now


class Choice(models.Model):
    question = models.ForeignKey(Question, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    choice_text = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    votes = models.IntegerField(default=0)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.choice_text

Add some sample data

Going forward we’ll need some data. We want a good spread across years for when we get to filtering, so lets create some questions, one a week for 150 weeks - starting a year and a half ago, and running a year and a half into the future.

Either grab the management command from the Fastview example project, or run the following code in ./manage.py shell:

import datetime
from django.utils import timezone
from polls.models import Choice, Question

start = timezone.now() - datetime.timedelta(weeks=75)
for i in range(150):
    question = Question.objects.create(
        question_text=f"Question {i+1}", pub_date=start + datetime.timedelta(weeks=i)
    )
    Choice.objects.bulk_create(
        [Choice(question=question, choice_text=f"Answer {j+1}") for j in range(5)]
    )

Now we’re ready to make a start. Lets move on to part 1 of this tutorial to learn how to add Fastview to your project and set up your first view group.