Failure to get data from database and onto template.

Executive Summary:

I need to know how to consistently write fbv's that get the content I want out of my database and into my templates for display on my site in the way I want it displayed.

I confess, I don't get it. Mark me down in points for asking a dumb question. I don't care. I need help.

 

Problem 1

I have successfully constructed my own function based view for listing all my articles with all their sections in a table of contents. At first they were not in order. I put an orderby on the models meta but that made no difference. Then I put an order_by ID in the view and that worked – except they were descending instead of ascending. Then I put reversed on the template and it worked.

 However, in the course of struggling with Problem 2, suddenly my table of contents is out of order again, and I have not touched those lines of code. I don't understand how that could be. Daniel Roseman suggested I create a new field, number it, and order by that instead of relying on the ID as PK, and I will do that if I have to, but right after that is when I discovered reversed so I didn't do it then. Now I'd like to know why the order changed when I haven't touched the code that (supposedly) fixed it.

 Template for loop code:

{% for a in A %}

 

    {% if a.sections_set.all %}

        <h1><li>{{ a.name }} {{ a.popular_name }}</li></h1>

            {% for section in a.sections_set.all reversed %}

 Model meta:

  class meta:

 

        ordering = ['id']

 View:

def TOC(request):

 

    A = Articles.objects.order_by('id')

    for a in A:

        a.sections_set.order_by('id')

    return render(request, 'statute.html', {'A': A,})

 

Problem 2 (the bigger one)

I cannot for the life of me get any articles or sections to come up on their own detail page. If I mouse over the links in my table of contents, the little preview url in the bottom right corner comes up correct for each one. I have bounced around from name error to type error to no match errors to does not exist errors and back again.

I have read the documentation. I have done the polls tutorial. I have read about context.  None of that matters. I have researched, tried this that and the other thing, and gotten nowhere. I have no doubt that it is something simple but simple or not I'm not getting it. If you can show me how to get it right, and keep getting it right consistently as I go forward, I would be very grateful.

Yes, I know there are class based views. I read that I can subclass them. But I fail to see the advantage of subclassing something I understand even less over learning to write what I want directly. I can't learn without understanding, and to do that I need to get my hands dirty writing the code, not relying on someone else's magic. I am not interested in a flame war as to whether or not CBV's were a good idea, but I will point out that there is almost zero documentation or tutorials on how to write your own FBV's, and certainly nothing on any complex FBV. I've been searching for over a week for it.

The template I am calling does come up. It overwrites base in all the places I expect it to. But there is no content. Debug toolbar says it is the right view. The only sql queries are sessions and user. Shouldn't there be at least one for the content? The context processors say my GET querydict is empty and my content is an empty string. The only fields I want to show on the detail pages are the name and the text. Here is the relevant portion of my template:

{% block content %}

 

<div>

{{ text }}

</div>

{% endblock content %}

(I tried {{a.text}} earlier, that didn't work either.)

Here is my urls.py

urlpatterns = patterns('',

 

url(r'^$', views.TOC, name='TOC'),

url(r'^(?P<id>\d+)\/(?P<slug>[-\w]+)', views.articleView, name='articleView'),

url(r'^(?P<id>\d+)\/(?P<slug>[-\w]+)', views.sectionView, name='sectionView'),

)

 

Here is my most recent attempt at a view:

 def articleView(request, **kwargs):

 

    a = Articles.objects.values('name', 'text')

    context = {'a' : a}

    return render(request, 'statute2.html', context)

Note that this is exactly the same format as laid out in Polls Tutorial 3: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/intro/tutorial03/#a-shortcut-render

The only difference is the presence of **kwargs. I was getting all kinds of errors before I tried **kwargs, and I was getting all kinds of errors with GET before I tried values(). Now I just have a blank template, which I also had at various times before **kwargs and values().

 

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