Building Data-Driven Web Apps with Flask and SQLAlchemy Transcripts
Chapter: Routing and URLs
Lecture: Refactoring view methods with Flask blueprints
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So here we are in our Flask app.
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And it's pretty standard, right?
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This is like how they tell you how to do it in Flask.
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Import flask, you create your app
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and then you create your view methods.
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You put your app.route on them.
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Well, okay, that's how you get started maybe sometimes.
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But this is a terrible way
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to organize real applications.
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It definitely encourages just cramming
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your entire web app into like a single file.
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Bad idea. And it's bad because Flask has a really
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super cool way of organizing your views
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that you don't have to do much at all about.
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You just change basically a one word right there
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and you're good to go.
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So what we're going to do in this little short segment
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is we're going to reorganize our code
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not because it's really that long
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you can see it's actually short
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but so that it's ready to grow
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as we build up this real application.
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So let's do a couple of things.
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The first thing I want to do
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is actually deal with this fake data.
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We're going to have a real database
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with lots of interesting stuff going on.
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So I want to create a special part
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of my application just for that.
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I'm going to call that services.
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Not web services, but services that are provided
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through our application like stuff that deals with packages
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stuff that deals with users, and so on
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so we can isolate that over here.
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So I'm going to create something called
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package_service. Like so.
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And then let's just take this code and put it over here.
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All right. Not super interesting.
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Remember, we don't have our data yet.
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We don't have our database.
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That's coming later.
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But, we can get started this way.
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So we're going to come here and say import
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pypi.org.services.package_service
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and let's say as just package_service.
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I noticed there were some errors down here
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so we can come and say .get_latest_packages.
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Just like that, I think that's the only place it's used.
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Okay, let's just make sure real quick
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that we didn't break it. We did not, okay super.
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That's what I expected.
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So, that organizes it a little bit
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gets some of the data access out of here.
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But this, this is the ultimate problem right there.
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However, it's tricky to reorganize it as is.
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So this needs to be created
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and then it needs to be used
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to start the app in this main app.py.
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And yet, it has to be available at the time
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that these are parsed so that we can apply the route.
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So, that can make it really tricky.
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There are patterns that allow you
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to share this across the file, different files
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but because Flask has this built in thing
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called Blueprints which are ways to predefine
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these routes and then later apply them
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after the app is created, we're going to use that.
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It's really nice.
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So, let's go down here and create a folder called views.
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And in the views folder, we're going to create
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let's start with two things
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we'll have a file called home_views
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keep adding that to get up.
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And we'll create another one
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called package_views.
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We don't really directly work with these often
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so the name isn't super important.
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Okay, so what we need to do is we want to take
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this is going to be the home stuff
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and we're going to put it over here.
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Well, immediately you can see the problem.
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Some of it's just an import problem, that's easy.
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Let's go up here and grab that
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'cause of my renaming.
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Okay that was easy, but the one that's left here
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hmm not so much.
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So, we're going to use this thing called
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a Flask Blueprint.
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And the way it works is we're going to come over here
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and we're going to say Blueprint
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you can also call it app if you want
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but let's not confuse things here.
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So we say Flask, which we have to import at the top
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we say Blueprint and in here
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we're going to give it three pieces of information.
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A friendly name, so in this case
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I'm going to call it home, 'cause it has to do
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with the home_views.
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And then for the import name
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I'm going to give it the __name__
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which is the name of this file, home_views.
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And then we want to set the template folder to templates.
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And then all we have to do is go down here
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instead of doing @app.route
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we say @blueprint.route.
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So, we just replace app with blueprint
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like so. Now, this sort of works
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this will sort of add some features here.
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And we go and run it
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let's see what's going to happen.
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We don't need this anymore.
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So, let's see if we run it
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is it going to be amazing?
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The chances are it's not going to be amazing.
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That didn't work.
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But remember, potentially these
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these are created before the app is there.
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And how does the app instance know about it?
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Well, we can do, there's a couple of things we can do.
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But, let's define, let's do a little bit of work here.
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Let's define a main
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and move that up.
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Now, before we do this let's call another function
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called register_blueprints
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or whatever we want to call it.
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Like so and then all we got to do is say
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so import home_views
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and then we can go over to the app
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this is the one that now exists here
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and we can say register_blueprint, like so
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and pass it in home_views.
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And that's it, that basically goes back
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and tells the app about the few routes
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and methods and what not are defined over here.
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It should work, let's give it a try.
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And it did not like that. Oh
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we can't aim for home_views, we have to
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aim for, register home_views not blueprint.
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Let's try that again. All right, there we go.
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So, looks like it's running
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but does it work? Moment of truth.
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Of course it works. Of course it works.
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Isn't that nice?
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So that lets us break our code apart.
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Our view code into these more specialized pieces.
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So, it might not be convincing to you yet
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how amazing this is, so let's go and add
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another one here for the package.
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So, for packages we're going to have a couple of things
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and I'm just going to copy a few bits here to start out.
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So, we're going to have a blueprint
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and it's going to be packages, that all looks good.
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And this is going to be packages
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what we want to have is maybe a details.
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And we're not going to do anything super interesting yet
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let's just return package details for some package.
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And here do we get to define our first
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interesting route, I guess I would say.
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This is going to be, let's remind us
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what that's going to look like.
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pypi.org, the real thing
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click on this one, it's going to be
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/project/<package_name>, okay.
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So that's what we want there
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so here we say package, let's do package_name.
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Like so. Now, notice start away that PyCharm is saying
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whoa, whoa, whoa there's something wrong
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with this part of your route. What is wrong?
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A function index does not have a parameter to take it.
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That's so cool. So, we just go in here and say
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it takes a string, now it's happy
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and we can actually put that there as well.
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Okay. Let's omit that out for a moment.
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So, we should be able to run this.
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Let's change the name, let's call this
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package_details.
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And the blueprint, we're also going to have to
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register this blueprint for it to work.
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So, last thing, I need to go down here
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to import package_views
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like so and then we can import it
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make sure everything's nice and cleaned up.
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Did it rerun? Probably it did rerun.
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Make sure, there we go.
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So, we've got our two things here
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but if we go to /project/abc
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boom, package details for abc.
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Okay, so we've defined our first interesting route
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but maybe even more importantly for the moment is
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we found a way to take our single super
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mega monolith file that was defining our application
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imagine there's fifty of these methods
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and breaking them apart by category.
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So, here we have home, these are the things
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to do with like home and about.
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And we'll have package and we'll have some
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other package things going on here as well.
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Of course we'll use that again in just a minute.
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And then in our templates folder
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I told you I was organize these
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with this in mind so here we have home
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we're also going to have a new folder called packages
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in which case we're going to put our details.html.
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So, let's just rob this one and call it
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details.html, of course, it doesn't
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have all the details yet, but it's going to.
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So, this organization here is directly tied
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to this organization that we did with blueprints there
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so, I think this is a great way to organize your code
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nothing about Flask encourages you
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or suggests that you should do these
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types of things, it's just a recommendation from me
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you don't have to but I think it's going to be
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really, really great as your app grows.
