Re: My "Contributors" page Conundrum

Hi JJ,

You're absolutely right that there is a better way to do this that doesn't involve repetition. To start with, check out the docs under example on the page for the URL dispatcher: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/ - I'll walk you through part of it though.

First, let's take a look at how capture groups work. Capture groups allow you to pass a variable portion of the url to a view, which is what you'll need to do in order to have one definition that lets you have a generic view that looks up the contributor. So, you can assign a view to a URL where only part of it is known at the time of the definition, and pass the unknown parts into the view. In your case, your url definition would look like:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    .... your other patterns...
    (r'^about/contributor/(?P<contribname>[a-zA-Z]+)/$', 'your.view.name'),
    ....possibly more patterns ....
)

So, what that (?P<contribname>[a-zA-Z]+) says, in parts is that we want to capture a value - designated by the parenthesis - to be passed to your.view.name as a named parameter called contribname - this is defined by the ?P<contribname>. That value looks like text with at least one character. The text definition is [a-zA-Z] (careful, this doesn't include spaces right now)and the at least one is +, and comes between two slashes. If you want to learn more about writing things like that, look into regular expressions.

Then, in your view, you can take that parameter and look up the relevant contributor and make the view generic to something like:

def contributor_page(request, contribname):

    contrib_object = Contributor.objects.filter(name=contribname)

    return render_to_response('contributor.html', {'Contributor': contrib_object}, context_instance = RequestContext(request))

Then, in outputting your links, you can put the relevant name in the url, etc.

I hope that helps. Let me know if anything is unclear. Good luck

On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 9:58 PM, JJ Zolper <codingatmt@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

I'm trying to develop a simple hyperlink between two pages. It sounds simple but it's a little bit more complex then that.

Here is the template code that proceeds through the database of contributors:

<center><u>Contributors</u></center>

<ol>

{% for Contributor in Contributors_List %}

   <li><a href="http://www.madtrak.com/about/contributors/">{{ Contributor.name }}</a></li>

<ul>

<li>Title: {{ Contributor.title }}</li>

</ul>

{% endfor %}

</ol>

and spits out the contributors name in a link form and the title of that person.

My problem is that I want each contributor to have their own separate page. So if the first guys name for some example is Mike Smith then if you were to click his name for example you would be sent to /about/contributor/mikesmith and so on. I supposed I could define a url for each contributor so I could set this up:

<center><u>Contributors</u></center>

<ol>

{% for Contributor in Contributors_List %}

    <li><a href="{{ Contributor.link">{{ Contributor.name }}</a></li>

<ul>

<li>Title: {{ Contributor.title }}</li>

</ul>

{% endfor %}

</ol>

but that doesn't seem like the correct way to do this. that Contributor.link is then hardcoded into the system. It's not generated by the system obviously.

I also have:

def mikesmith(request):

    mikesmith = Contributor.objects.filter(name='Mike Smith')

    return render_to_response('mikesmith.html', {'Contributor': mikesmith}, context_instance = RequestContext(request))

I have that repeated for each and every contributor. This goes againist Django's DRY mentality so I have a feeling there is a much better way.

Thanks,

JJ

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