The Authors Page

Part of the Models and the Admin section of Coddy's Django journey. Lesson 22 of 23.

Your bookshelf has a page per book but none for authors. This project builds one from what you know: a view that queries the database, a URL, a template that follows relations, and a QuerySet that does not run a query per row.

Each author is listed with their books: a loop over the authors, and inside it a loop over each author's books. Without help the inner loop runs one query per author. select_related() cannot help, because from an author to their books is the way back. Its partner, prefetch_related(), fetches the related rows of every object in the list with one more query.

The task says what the page must do; the code is yours.

Challenge

Medium

Build an Authors page at /authors/, URL name authors:

Each author gets a <section class="author"> with their name in an <h2> and links to each of their books.
The page runs the same few queries however many authors there are.
The header in books/base.html links to it as Authors.

Press Run and click Authors.

Try it yourself

from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404, render

from .models import Book


def home(request):
    books = Book.objects.select_related("author")
    return render(request, "books/home.html", {"books": books})


def book_detail(request, pk):
    book = get_object_or_404(Book, pk=pk)
    return render(request, "books/book_detail.html", {"book": book})


def search(request):
    q = request.GET.get("q", "")
    books = Book.objects.filter(title__icontains=q).select_related("author")
    return render(request, "books/search.html", {"q": q, "books": books})