The skeletons bundled with dja_skel require that the source code (application and project) follows a few simple rules. In this chapter we will see how to adapt exiting code to play well with dja_skel.
At this point of dja_skel development the customisation must be made by hand. Future dja_skel releases may provide some means to automate the process.
Warning
make sure you have a backup of your code before proceeding.
By default the applications generated with manage.py startapp provide modules for the views, models etc. This is simple but as your application grows so does the modules and they quickly become unmanageable.
On the other hand, from dja_skel‘s the point of view, fiddling with a big monolithic module is very complex: for example, we bootstrap a view that requires objects from the django.forms package, an import must be added if no such import exists, but the import statement can take different forms (from django import forms, from django.forms import * etc.), guessing if it’s already present may be challenging.
For these reasons it was decided that the skeletons bundled with dja_skel will operate only on packages rather than modules, putting each element they create in its own modules within the package.
Note
Third party skeletons may behave differently.
Converting a module, say my_module.py, into a package is relatively easy:
$ mkdir my_module
$ rm -f my_module.pyc
$ mv my_module.py my_module/old_module.py
$ touch my_module/__init__.py
Edit my_module/__init__.py so that i looks like:
from my_module.old_module import *
That way the external code will still be able to import objects from the package my_module as they did before.
There are two points that we must take care of when converting a module into a package:
if the module does relative imports they must be corrected, either using absolute imports or adjusting the relativity:
from mylib import something
may be converted into:
from myapp.mylib import something
models defined in the models package must include an app_label in the Meta class:
class MyModel(models.Model):
...
class Meta:
app_label = "myapp"
In order to know where to insert things dja_skel requires that some markers are present in the application sources. What markers and in which archives will depend on the skeletons being used. Read the documentation provided by the skeletons.
A marker is a text like -*- I'M A MARKER -*-. Text preceding and following the marker in the same line is ignored. That way it’s possible to insert a marker in a file as a comment.
In a python module:
urlpatterns = patterns(
"myapp.views",
# -*- VIEW URLS -*-
)
In a django template:
{% comment %}-*- MENU ENTRIES -*-{% endcomment %}