Adding a CMS to Your Flask Web App Transcripts
Chapter: The redirects (our bit.ly)
Lecture: Concept: ViewModels
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Now, before we move on, let's take our code that we've written and make it better make it easier to test
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and make all the different parts that we work with more focused. And we're gonna do that following this thing called a view model pattern.
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Now the website, the data driven website, has been using view models all over the place because that was how it was built
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But we just started from there and we had it on the CMS thing. So you might not have noticed this idea of a view model. So what is this? Well,
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it's most useful when you're accepting user input. You have an HTML form. People are filling it out. They hit, save goes back to the website.
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That data has to be synchronized back to Python. You know what they type into the form Are all the required fields there?
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Maybe there's conversions. They typed in a string. You got to convert it to a number or a date or something like that.
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So the idea of the view model is we're going to take what would otherwise be a really complicated and long method here.
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This is like our CMS requests that we were just messing with. And as we add more validation as we add more logic,
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this just gets longer and longer and it's more complicated and it's harder to test. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna break it into two things.
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The view method that actually handles the request that works with the Web.
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Bremer returns the responses, and then this thing we're calling the view model, this is what we're gonna build.
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This is a separate Python class that knows what data should be exchanged, what is valid, what is invalid. What is the logic to do all that stuff.
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So instead of having that among you method all in one, we're gonna have a view model that it's created by the view method.
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It gets all the data and validates everything and then, as comes back and just helps the view method do its magic.
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Also, this is gonna help with testing if we want to write tests, because it's easy to test the view model outside of the Web framework,
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it typically doesn't need much in terms of what's going on there. Where is maybe the view method is much more complicated gotta start of the website of
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the Web app and get it all up and running before it can actually do its