Glossary¶

field

An attribute on a model; a given field usually maps directly to a single database column.

See Models.

generic view

A higher-order view function that provides an abstract/generic implementation of a common idiom or pattern found in view development.

See Generic views.

model

Models store your application’s data.

See Models.

MTV

See Django appears to be a MVC framework, but you call the Controller the “view”, and the View the “template”. How come you don’t use the standard names?.

MVC

Model-view-controller; a software pattern. Django follows MVC to some extent.

project

A Python package – i.e. a directory of code – that contains all the settings for an instance of Django. This would include database configuration, Django-specific options and application-specific settings.

property

Also known as “managed attributes”, and a feature of Python since version 2.2. From the property documentation:

Properties are a neat way to implement attributes whose usage resembles attribute access, but whose implementation uses method calls. [...] You could only do this by overriding __getattr__ and __setattr__; but overriding __setattr__ slows down all attribute assignments considerably, and overriding __getattr__ is always a bit tricky to get right. Properties let you do this painlessly, without having to override __getattr__ or __setattr__.

queryset

An object representing some set of rows to be fetched from the database.

See Making queries.

slug

A short label for something, containing only letters, numbers, underscores or hyphens. They’re generally used in URLs. For example, in a typical blog entry URL:

http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2008/apr/12/spring/

the last bit (spring) is the slug.

template

A chunk of text that acts as formatting for representing data. A template helps to abstract the presentation of data from the data itself.

See The Django template language.

view

A function responsible for rending a page.