Step 4: Render and Handler Shells

The handler classes, and the calls to render, have explicit arguments.

Let's make the class and method outline more rigid, 'hardening' the shells of both.

Some might complain that this approach is too top-down, that I'm not following an end-to-end incremental methodology here. But, this is runnable code. Over the decades, programming languages and environments have shifted towards pseudocode, so that we can ease our way through these early differentiating stages more naturally. The previous steps could be end-to-end, and runnable, if the language and environment shifted a little further in this direction. And if it included higher-level descriptions for web pathways.

There's a hidden assumption in what follows -- it's in my mind, so I might as well spell it out early. For simplicity, I'll be using one Django template, which I'll name index.html, to create the HTML presented to the user. The template will be populated with Item and List data by my render function, which in turn is passed a Python dictionary (a collection of name-value pairs). This dictionary also includes switches to turn the forms on and off.

Here's an implementation outline of the five handler methods + 1 render function:

def render (template_values):

# put data in template_values

# call Django templating

# return results to calling handler

class HomePage (webapp.RequestHandler):

def get (self):

# create vanilla home page

# by calling render

class CreateList (webapp.RequestHandler):

def get (self):

# create list form

# by calling render

def post (self):

# insert data from list form

# redirect to home

class CreateItem (webapp.RequestHandler):

def get (self, list_key):

# create item form with hidden list_key

# by calling render

def post (self):

# insert data from item form

# redirect to home

I call my render function for GETs, and I redirect to home after POSTs. I could consistently call the render function, or with a session layer I could consistently redirect. I'm just trying to reduce overhead, for this example.

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