Methodology for creating a basic forum in Django

Using Django
1

Hi everyone !

In order to improve my Django skills, I decided to try to create a very basic forum app.

For the moment being I have three templates :

  1. forums.html

  2. topics.html

  3. posts.html

My issue is with the second template “topics.html” :

Indeed, if you take a look at this section :

<tbody>

{% for topic in topic_model %}

<tr>

    <td><a href="{{topic.topic_name}}">{{topic.topic_name}}</a></td>

    <td>{{topic.topic_description}}</td>

    <td>{{topic.topic_author}}</td>

    <td>{{topic.topic_answers}}</td>

    <td>{{topic.topic_last_answer_by}}</td>

</tr>

{% endfor %}

</tbody>

I’ve got an issue because if the topic_name is “Hello World”, this will result in :

localhost:8000/forums/topics/Hello World/

Which is not correct, what I would like is to automatically convert this to :

localhost:8000/forums/topics/hello-world/

Here is the full code for my models.py and views.py files :

models.py

class Topic(models.Model):
    topic_forum = models.ForeignKey(Forum, related_name="topic_forum", default=None, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    topic_name = models.CharField(max_length=40)
    topic_description = models.CharField(max_length=80, blank=True)
    topic_author = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name="topic_author", on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    topic_creation_date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    topic_answers = models.IntegerField(default=0)
    topic_last_answer_by = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name="topic_last_answer_by", on_delete=models.CASCADE)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.topic_name

views.py

def forum_page(request, forum_name):
    template_path = os.path.join("forums","topics.html")
    forum = Forum.objects.get(forum_name__iexact=forum_name)
    topic_model = Topic.objects.filter(topic_forum=forum)
    processTopicName(topic_model)

    return render(request,template_path,{"forum":forum, "topic_model": topic_model})

In the above view, you can see that I have added a processTopicName function :

def processTopicName(topic_model):

    #Process topic name
    new_topic_model = []

    for topic in topic_model:
        topic_new_name = topic_name.replace(" ","-")
        topic_new_name = topic_new_name.lower()

        new_topic_model.append(topic_new_name)

    return topic_new_name

But I don’t really know how to implement it the right way…

Thank you in advance for your help :smiley:

2

How does your urls.py look like?

The best way to solve your issue is to add get_absolute_url method to your method that returns the url to a single item. And the you could use it in a template:

<a href="{{ topic.get_absolute_url }}">{{ topic.name }}</a>

More on get_absolute_url can be found in docs: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/ref/models/instances/#get-absolute-url

3

Hi,

Could you please delete this topic as this is a doublon
Indeed, the real one is :

Thank you in advance for your comprehension

(I wanted to send a Flag message but I got a 500 Internal error)