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Module 04: Django Fundamentals — MTV, ORM, Migrations, Admin, and Views

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Stub module. This module covers the Django MTV pattern, the ORM and QuerySet API, migrations, the admin interface, URL routing, and class-based vs function-based views. Full content to be generated on demand.

Overview

Django's design philosophy is "convention over configuration." Where Flask made you choose and assemble every component, Django provides a complete, integrated system with strong opinions about how each part should work. This module teaches you Django's core conventions — the ones that every Django developer must internalize to be productive.

The MTV (Model–Template–View) pattern is Django's name for MVC. Models define data; Views handle requests and business logic; Templates render the response. The ORM translates between Python model classes and database tables. Migrations track schema changes. The admin interface is auto-generated from your models.

Prerequisites

  • Module 03: Flask Advanced — ORM concepts, migrations, session auth, testing
  • Understanding of class-based programming in Python (inheritance, super(), class attributes)
  • Basic HTML and SQL

Objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  1. Create a Django project and application with django-admin startproject and manage.py startapp
  2. Define Django models with fields, relationships (ForeignKey, ManyToManyField), and Meta options
  3. Write and apply migrations using manage.py makemigrations and manage.py migrate
  4. Query the database using Django's QuerySet API (filter, exclude, annotate, select_related, prefetch_related)
  5. Customize the Django admin interface to make it useful for content management
  6. Define URL patterns in urls.py with path() and re_path()
  7. Write function-based views (FBVs) and class-based views (CBVs) and explain the trade-offs between them

Topics Covered

  • Django project structure: settings.py, urls.py, wsgi.py, manage.py
  • Django apps: startapp, INSTALLED_APPS, the app registry
  • Models: field types, relationships (ForeignKey, OneToOneField, ManyToManyField), Meta, __str__
  • QuerySet API: filter(), exclude(), get(), create(), update(), delete(), annotate(), values(), distinct()
  • select_related() and prefetch_related() — solving the N+1 problem
  • Migrations: makemigrations, migrate, showmigrations, sqlmigrate, data migrations
  • Django admin: ModelAdmin, list_display, list_filter, search_fields, readonly_fields, inline models
  • URL routing: path(), include(), named URLs, URL namespaces, reverse()
  • Function-based views: HttpRequest, HttpResponse, JsonResponse, render(), redirect()
  • Class-based views: View, TemplateView, ListView, DetailView, CreateView, UpdateView, DeleteView
  • [[django-fastapi-flask/modules/03_flask-advanced]] — Flask ORM and migrations comparison
  • [[django-fastapi-flask/modules/05_django-advanced]] — DRF, signals, Celery, and more
  • [[django-fastapi-flask/modules/08_database-patterns]] — advanced ORM patterns
  • [[shared/glossary#orm]] — ORM glossary entry
  • [[shared/glossary#migration]] — migration glossary entry

Summary

  • Django's MTV pattern separates data (Model), presentation (Template), and request handling (View)
  • The ORM maps Python classes to database tables; the QuerySet API provides a lazy, composable query interface
  • Migrations are generated automatically from model changes and applied incrementally
  • The Django admin is auto-generated from models and customizable for real content management
  • URL routing in urls.py maps URL patterns to view functions or classes
  • CBVs reduce boilerplate for common patterns (list, detail, create, update, delete); FBVs offer more explicit control