Mixins for reusable behavior in Django - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Mixins for Reusable Behavior in Django Views

📖 Scenario: You are building a Django web app that shows a list of books. You want to add a feature that only shows books published after a certain year. To keep your code clean and reusable, you will use a mixin to add this filtering behavior to your view.

🎯 Goal: Create a Django view that uses a mixin to filter books published after a given year. You will first set up the data, then add a filter year variable, apply the filtering logic in a mixin, and finally use the mixin in your view.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list of book dictionaries with title and year keys

Add a variable to hold the filter year

Create a mixin class that filters books by the filter year

Create a Django view class that uses the mixin to show filtered books

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Mixins help you write clean Django views by reusing common behaviors like filtering data without repeating code.

💼 Career

Understanding mixins is important for Django developers to build scalable and maintainable web applications.

1

Set up the initial book data

Create a list called books with these exact dictionaries: {'title': 'Django Basics', 'year': 2018}, {'title': 'Advanced Django', 'year': 2021}, and {'title': 'Python Tips', 'year': 2015}.

Django

# Create the list of books with title and year
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a list with dictionaries. Each dictionary has keys 'title' and 'year'.

2

Add a filter year variable

Create a variable called filter_year and set it to 2017.

Django

books = [
    {'title': 'Django Basics', 'year': 2018},
    {'title': 'Advanced Django', 'year': 2021},
    {'title': 'Python Tips', 'year': 2015}
]
# Create filter_year variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just create a variable named filter_year and assign the number 2017.

3

Create a mixin to filter books by year

Define a class called FilterByYearMixin with a method get_filtered_books(self) that returns a list of books from the global books list where the book's year is greater than filter_year.

Django

books = [
    {'title': 'Django Basics', 'year': 2018},
    {'title': 'Advanced Django', 'year': 2021},
    {'title': 'Python Tips', 'year': 2015}
]

filter_year = 2017

# Define FilterByYearMixin class with get_filtered_books method
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a list comprehension inside the method to filter books by comparing book['year'] with filter_year.

4

Create a Django view using the mixin

Define a Django view class called BookListView that inherits from FilterByYearMixin and View. Add a method get(self, request) that returns the filtered books by calling self.get_filtered_books().

Django

books = [
    {'title': 'Django Basics', 'year': 2018},
    {'title': 'Advanced Django', 'year': 2021},
    {'title': 'Python Tips', 'year': 2015}
]

filter_year = 2017

class FilterByYearMixin:
    def get_filtered_books(self):
        return [book for book in books if book['year'] > filter_year]

# Define BookListView inheriting FilterByYearMixin and View
# Add get method returning self.get_filtered_books()
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Remember to import View from django.views. Your view class should inherit from both the mixin and View.