04 - Setting Up Categories in Admin

Section 04: Setting Up Categories in Admin

• Setting up Category Models and Admin
• Serialize the Data from Database in Django
• Category API Routing and Views in Django
• Testing with Postman for Category in Django

Setting up Category Models and Admin

A Model is the single, definitive source of information about our data in Django. Each model is just a Python class that subclasses django.db.models.Model. Let's create the models in the models.py of category app:

from django.db import models


class Category(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    description = models.CharField(max_length=250)
    created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    updated_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.name

If we want to manipulate our data in the admin panel, we should register the Category class in the admin.py file after creating our Category class.

from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Category


# Register your models here.
admin.site.register(Category)

Don't forget to do migration and adding apps to INSTALLED_APPS in setting.py before running our server, both of them are common problems that happend to all the Django Creators. By the way, the name of the category should be exactly the same with name inside apps.py file.

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Serialize the Data from Database in Django

Migrations are necessary whenever we create a new model and register that model. And once the migration files are there by running python manage.py makemigrations, we simply have to make the migrations by running python manage.py migrate.

The other thing we need to get started on our Web API is to provide a way of serializing and deserializing the instances into representations such as json. We can do this by declaring serializers that work very similar to Django's forms in the serializers.py file of category app:

from rest_framework import serializers

from .models import Category


class CategorySerializer(serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Category
        fields = ('name', 'description')

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Category API Routing and Views in Django

Let's see how to write some the views using our the CategorySerializer class.

from rest_framework import viewsets

from .serializers import CategorySerializer
from .models import Category


class CategoryViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = Category.objects.all().order_by('name')
    serializer_class = CategorySerializer

In order to enable the CategoryViewSet, we need to add routes to urls.py of category app.

from rest_framework import routers
from django.urls import path, include

from . import views

router = routers.DefaultRouter()
router.register(r'', views.CategoryViewSet)

urlpatterns = [
    path('', include(router.urls))
]

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Testing with Postman for Category in Django

Postman is such a great tool for every developers to test the APIs.

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