django-bakery

Configuring where detail pages are built

If you are seeking to publish a detail page for each record in a database model, our recommended way is using the BuildableDetailView.

When the view is executed via bakery’s standard build process, it will loop through each object in the table and build a corresponding page at a path determined by the view’s get_url method.

You can override get_url to build the pages anywhere you want, but the easiest route is by configuring Django’s standard get_absolute_url method on the model, which is where get_url looks by default.

Here’s an example. Let’s start with a model that will contain a record for each of America’s 50 states. Notice how we have defined Django’s standard get_absolute_url method to return a URL that features each state’s unique postal code.

from django.db im­port mod­els
from bakery.mod­els im­port Build­ableMod­el


class State(Build­ableMod­el):
    name = mod­els.Char­Field(max_length=100)
    postal_code = models.CharField(max_length=2, unique=True)

    def get_absolute_url(self):
        return '/%s/' % self.postal_code

That model is then connected to a BuildableDetailView that can create a page for every state.

from myapp.models import State
from bakery.views import BuildableDetailView


class StateDetailView(BuildableDetailView):
    model = State
    template_name = 'state_detail.html'

As described in the getting started guide, that view will need to be added to the BAKERY_VIEWS list in settings.py.

Now, because the URL has been preconfigured with get_absolute_url, all 50 pages can be built with the standard management command (assuming your settings have been properly configured).

$ python manage.py build

That will create pages like this in the build directory.

build/AL/index.html
build/AK/index.html
build/AR/index.html
build/AZ/index.html
build/CA/index.html
build/CO/index.html
... etc ...

If you wanted to build objects using a pattern independent of the model, you can instead override the get_url method on the BuildableDetailView.

from myapp.models import State
from bakery.views import BuildableDetailView


class ExampleDetailView(BuildableDetailView):
    model = State
    template_name = 'state_detail.html'

    def get_url(self, obj):
        return '/my-fancy-pattern/state/%s/' % obj.postal_code

That will create pages like this in the build directory.

build/my-fancy-pattern/state/AL/index.html
build/my-fancy-pattern/state/AK/index.html
build/my-fancy-pattern/state/AR/index.html
build/my-fancy-pattern/state/AZ/index.html
build/my-fancy-pattern/state/CA/index.html
build/my-fancy-pattern/state/CO/index.html
... etc ...

Building JSON instead of HTML

Suppose you have a view the acts like an API, generating a small snippet of JSON. In this case, the official Django documentation recommends the following usage of class-based views to render the page in a dynamic website.

import json
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.views.generic import TemplateView


class JSONResponseMixin(object):
    """
    A mixin that can be used to render a JSON response.
    """
    def render_to_json_response(self, context, **response_kwargs):
        """
        Returns a JSON response, transforming 'context' to make the payload.
        """
        return HttpResponse(
            self.convert_context_to_json(context),
            content_type='application/json',
            **response_kwargs
        )

    def convert_context_to_json(self, context):
        "Convert the context dictionary into a JSON object"
        # Note: This is *EXTREMELY* naive; in reality, you'll need
        # to do much more complex handling to ensure that arbitrary
        # objects -- such as Django model instances or querysets
        # -- can be serialized as JSON.
        return json.dumps(context)


class JSONView(JSONResponseMixin, TemplateView):
    def render_to_response(self, context, **response_kwargs):
        return self.render_to_json_response(context, **response_kwargs)

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        return {'this-is': 'dummy-data'}

The same design pattern can work with django-bakery to build a flat version of the JSON response. All that’s necessary is to substitute a buildable view with some additional configuration.

import json
from django.http import HttpResponse
from bakery.views import BuildableTemplateView


class JSONResponseMixin(object):
    """
    A mixin that can be used to render a JSON response.
    """
    def render_to_json_response(self, context, **response_kwargs):
        """
        Returns a JSON response, transforming 'context' to make the payload.
        """
        return HttpResponse(
            self.convert_context_to_json(context),
            content_type='application/json',
            **response_kwargs
        )

    def convert_context_to_json(self, context):
        "Convert the context dictionary into a JSON object"
        # Note: This is *EXTREMELY* naive; in reality, you'll need
        # to do much more complex handling to ensure that arbitrary
        # objects -- such as Django model instances or querysets
        # -- can be serialized as JSON.
        return json.dumps(context)


class BuildableJSONView(JSONResponseMixin, BuildableTemplateView):
    # Nothing more than standard bakery configuration here
    build_path = 'jsonview.json'

    def render_to_response(self, context, **response_kwargs):
        return self.render_to_json_response(context, **response_kwargs)

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        return {'this-is': 'dummy-data'}

    def get_content(self):
        """
        Overrides an internal trick of buildable views so that bakery
        can render the HttpResponse substituted above for the typical Django
        template by the JSONResponseMixin
        """
        return self.get(self.request).content

Building a single view on demand

The build management command can regenerate all pages for all views in the BAKERY_VIEWS settings variable. A buildable model can recreate all pages related to a single object. But can you rebuild all pages created by just one view? Yes, and all it takes is importing the view and invoking its build_method.

>>> from yourapp.views import DummyDe­tailView
>>> DummyDe­tailView().build_method()

A simple way to automate that kind of targeted build might be to create a custom management command and connect it to a cron job.

from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand, CommandError
from yourapp.views import DummyDetailView

class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = 'Rebuilds all pages created by the DummyDetailView'

    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        DummyDe­tailView().build_method()

Or, if you wanted to rebuild the view without deleting everything else in the existing build directory, you could pass it as an argument to the standard build command with instructions to skip everything else it normally does.

$ python manage.py build yourapp.views.DummyDetailView --keep-build-dir --skip-static --skip-media

Enabling Amazon’s accelerated uploads

If your bucket has enabled Amazon’s S3 transfer acceleration service, you can configure bakery it use by overriding the default AWS_S3_HOST variable in settings.py.

AWS_S3_HOST = 's3-accelerate.amazonaws.com'