Django not serving text data points for template (home page)

Using Django Forms & APIs
15

Eureka! Thank you for your patience and for taking the time to write such detailed feedback and guidance so far, Ken. I got it working! (Partially). Django is serving the template with content, but I am still not quite there yet. We are noless making progress.

Leveraging DetailView -- Classy CBV again, as well as based on your suggested PageContent objects dbase call, I commented out all the repetitive class declarations in models.py and in views.py. I scrapped all 4 templates and am just using 1 now. It’s essentially a whole new web app.

For my use case, so far we’ve discussed a ‘home’ page and ‘about’ page but originally I also planned a page for ‘contact’ and ‘podcasts’. Previously, I had 4 separate models and 4 separate DetailViews in total to account for these pages. I have since got rid of all of that and have a single class model and single CBV.

Even though it still doesn’t fully work as intended, I already can identify the problem. I’ve tried a few different possibilities by swapping different variables and parameters but I still can’t quite get it right. After I share my latest source code below, I will provide an analysis of the problem as I see it as well as the things I’ve tried, albeit unsuccessfully so far.

Here we go.

Here is my (new) single model declaration:

class PageContent(models.Model):
   # title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
   slug = models.SlugField(null=False, unique=True, blank=True)
   page_type = models.CharField(max_length=20)
   body = RichTextField(config_name='default',max_length=300000,blank=True, null=True)


   def __str__(self):
       return f'{self.page_type}'

The main difference there is the page_type attribute that Ken recommended as well as the fact that I have cut out all the other class models.

Here is my views.py:

from django.views.generic import DetailView # TemplateView
from .models import PageContent # Home, Podcast, About, Contact


class PageView(DetailView):
   model = PageContent
   template_name = "landings/page_detail.html"
   context_object_name = 'contents' 
      
   def get_object(self): # queryset=None # page_type
       obj = PageContent.objects.get(page_type='home')
       return obj

In the PageView, I have this: PageContent.objects.get(page_type='home') dbase call which is what Ken recommended I try as well. Now I figure that the page_type parameter’s string assignment with ‘home’ was supposed to be merely a temporary stop gap or placeholder because there is going to be more than one page_types. Ken also indicated I’ll need to check to make sure there are no duplicates. One way to understand this clearly is when I change ‘home’ to ‘about’ or to ‘contact’, Django begins serving that corresponding data that I have entered into the Admin Dashboard. So what I am trying to figure out next is how to make the page_type call dynamic. One way I can think of, or at least if I was working with an id, would be to pass in a pk variable which would be an integer. But in my case, I am working with a slug which is a string. To this end, I’ve tried to make my string parameter dynamic by adding pk to the get_object method call and then changing page_type='home' to page_type=pk. That didn’t work. Next I tried changing page_type='home' by integrating an f-string like this: page_type=f’{page_type}’. That didn’t work either. I tried many other alternatives without success.

So a little more guidance here on how to make this page_type variable dynamic, I think I will have reached a full resolution and can mark this thread as solved.

For what it is worth, here is my single custom template:

{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% block content %}
   {% if contents %}
      {{ contents.body|safe }}
   {% endif %}
{% endblock %}

That’s a big change because in the past I had 4 templates which were basically all the same. Now I just have this one. I am no longer repeating myself here.

Finally, here is my urls.py which is also imperfect:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include
from .views import PageView #HomeView, AboutView, PodcastView, ContactView

app_name= 'landings'

urlpatterns = [
   path('<str:slug>/', PageView.as_view(),name='home'),
]

I noticed that when I change the name path parameter to one string or another, Django still serves the template with the same data, whether the data be for the ‘contact’ or ‘about’. I tried to make this ‘name’ parameter dynamic by using an f-string. No dice.

The only way to get Django to serve different data is if I change the page_type parameter in the get_object() DetailView class method so I believe that is my main knowledge gap as described earlier.

Thanks again @KenWhitesell for your help and patience. :slight_smile: