Building Data-Driven Web Apps with Flask and SQLAlchemy Transcripts
Chapter: Jinja2 templates
Lecture: Demo: @response a better render_template

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0:00 Now lets look at our views so far here
0:02 we've got our index, and we've got our about
0:06 I'm not a huge fan of calling flask.render_template
0:09 all of this, all the time.
0:11 What I'd rather do is just say
0:13 do something like this, return
0:16 packages, test-test packages.
0:18 Just return some kind of dictionary
0:20 that we can get from some model classes or
0:22 other sorts of transformations that we want to make.
0:24 And just send those back
0:25 and have it just somehow know, use index.
0:28 Would be nice if that was named home
0:30 and that's named index, it would just magically find it.
0:33 You know maybe we could actually
0:34 write some code that'll work, and do that.
0:36 But we're going to do a little bit of a, change here.
0:40 So if you go and look at the Flask documentation they
0:41 talked about different ways in which to do this.
0:44 And here's one that I came up with
0:45 and they talk about it about it as well.
0:47 And what I'm going to do is
0:48 I'm going to use a decorator to specify, like at response.
0:52 And then I'll say, you know
0:53 something like, that right there.
0:58 And then we're just going to return this.
1:00 Okay, so, come down here like so.
1:03 I know what I want to do is I want to make a folder, that holds
1:06 a bunch of these little utility pieces and whatnot.
1:08 So I'm going to call this, actually
1:10 going to go up here, and run that.
1:12 Create a directory called, infrastructure.
1:19 Like so, and this is some pretty touchy
1:22 and not fun to write code.
1:25 So let's go just copy and paste
1:26 and have a quick look at it.
1:29 So here MIME type is just a variable name
1:31 that Hydron thought was misspelled, it's not.
1:33 There's a little diagnostics for you.
1:35 So what we're going to do is we're
1:37 this decorate called, response.
1:39 And it takes only keyword arguments
1:41 that means you cannot pass positional arguments.
1:45 And it's a function we call that returns
1:46 a decorated that just wraps any function
1:49 that takes any arguments, using itertool wraps
1:53 so you get the right error
1:56 error handling, error reporting and other info.
1:58 And then it's going to go in it says "Look
2:00 if it's a response just return it.
2:02 But if it's a dictionary
2:04 then we're going to go and actually find the template file
2:08 and just do render to template, back."
2:10 Also lets you set the MIME type
2:12 because that's not super easy to do as well.
2:15 We're going to go over here
2:16 and now if we just import this, at the top
2:20 let me see if I can have it all with that thing.
2:22 Now we can say response, and this has a keyword only
2:26 so if you do it like this
2:28 and let's go down here like this one.
2:30 And say this one is just home-about.
2:32 There's nothing interesting going on to that one.
2:35 And then we can just say "Return, empty dictionary."
2:38 You may like this, you may not like this, right?
2:40 It's up to you I personally like to specify
2:43 this is the page and then only return the data.
2:46 You'll see in a real page
2:48 like you'd have this repeated three
2:49 or four times potentially.
2:50 In, uh more complicated ones.
2:52 So I don't like that, not much at all.
2:54 So this is the way I'm going to do it.
2:56 Maybe I'll leave this one here
2:58 well at least in this chapter so you can see.
3:00 So let's see if I broke it or if it still works.
3:02 That's the first one to see if it's a good idea.
3:04 Hey look at that, that looks a whole lot like that homepage
3:08 that looks like the about page.
3:10 Pretty cool, huh?
3:11 Well I feel like this definitely simplifies this.
3:14 Like I said it's again
3:15 a little simple to really appreciate it
3:17 But when you have like, some conditions
3:19 and some tests, you want to return
3:20 you want to render that over and over
3:22 but with different data like
3:24 "No you didn't submit the form right.
3:26 Here's the same page but different data."
3:28 So like with an error message or something.
3:30 This mode here can get super tedious.
3:32 So I'm a fan of this, optional but if you like it
3:35 it's going to be in the code and you can take it with you.