Creating the To-Do Model

Introduction

Welcome to the lesson on creating the To-Do model in Django . In this lesson, we will focus on building the foundational model for our To-Do application. The goal is to help you understand how to define a model in Django, set up corresponding views, and map these views to URLs so that you can create and display To-Do items via an API endpoint. Models in Django are used to define the structure of your database tables. By the end of this lesson, you will be able to create a Todo model with fields for the task description and its completion status and expose this data through an API that you can test.

Creating the To-Do Model

In Django, a model defines the structure of your database tables. Each model is a Python class that subclasses django.db.models.Model . It contains fields that represent the columns of the table. Let's create our Todo model. Here is the code for creating the basic Todo model in models.py : Python from django.db import models class Todo(models.Model): task = models.CharField(max_length=200) completed = models.BooleanField(default=False) def __str__(self): return self.task task : This field is a CharField, which is used to store text data. Note that CharField must have a max_length parameter. We set the max_length to 200, which means this field can store up to 200 characters. completed : This field is a BooleanField that stores a True or False value. We set the default value to False, meaning that a task is not completed by default.__str__(self) : This method returns the model's string representation. It is used when you print an instance of the model, or when the instance is displayed in the Django admin interface or Django shell. As we won't need it in the first courses of this path, we define it as simply the task.name . However, in your project, you can come up with any__str__method behaviour you find comfortable. This model represents an SQL table for storing tasks. The columns of this table will be id, task, and completed . Note that we don't need to define the id column manually, Django will create it automatically. Here is an illustration of how the SQL table would look: id task completed 1 Example Task 1 False 2 Example Task 2 True

id	task	completed
1	Example Task 1	False
2	Example Task 2	True

Common Field Types in Django Models

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Creating Objects

Django Field	Python Type	Description
`CharField`	`str`	Used to store text data with a maximum length.
`BooleanField`	`bool`	Used to store `True`/`False` values.
`IntegerField`	`int`	Used to store integer values.
`FloatField`	`float`	Used to store floating-point numbers.
`DateField`	`datetime.date`	Used to store dates (without time).
`DateTimeField`	`datetime.datetime`	Used to store date and time.
`TextField`	`str`	Used to store large text data.
`EmailField`	`str`	Used to store email addresses.

We will cover creating new objects in deep detail in the next course. However, let's implement a quick way to send post requests so we can test our app.

Here is the code for the updated TodoList view in views.py:

Python

from rest_framework.views import APIView
from rest_framework.response import Response
from rest_framework import status
from .models import Todo

class TodoList(APIView):
    def get(self, request):
        todos = Todo.objects.all()
        return Response({"data": todos})

    def post(self, request):
        task = request.data.get('task')
        completed = request.data.get('completed', False)
        todo = Todo.objects.create(task=task, completed=completed)
        return Response({"data": {"task": todo.task, "completed": todo.completed}}, status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED)

from rest_framework.views import APIView
from rest_framework.response import Response
from rest_framework import status
from .models import Todo

class TodoList(APIView):
    def get(self, request):
        todos = Todo.objects.all()
        return Response({"data": todos})

    def post(self, request):
        task = request.data.get('task')
        completed = request.data.get('completed', False)
        todo = Todo.objects.create(task=task, completed=completed)
        return Response({"data": {"task": todo.task, "completed": todo.completed}}, status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED)

The new post method allows us to send requests with some new task data to create new objects. Let's break it down.

post(self, request): This method handles POST requests.
request.data.get('task'): This retrieves the task value from the request data.
request.data.get('completed', False): This retrieves the completed value from the request data; if not provided, it defaults to False.
Todo.objects.create(task=task, completed=completed): This creates a new To-Do item in the database.
status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED: This indicates that a new resource has been created successfully, which is the standard status code for a successful POST request in REST APIs.

The Response function from rest_framework.response is used to generate an HTTP response with the given data and status code. For POST methods, it serializes the returned data into JSON format and sends it back to the client.

Introduction