Filtering with django-filter - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Filtering with django-filter

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple web app to display a list of books. Users want to filter books by their genre.

🎯 Goal: Create a Django view that uses django-filter to filter books by genre and display the filtered list.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Django model called Book with fields title and genre

Create a filter class called BookFilter using django_filters.FilterSet to filter by genre

Create a view called book_list that applies BookFilter to the Book queryset

Render the filtered books in a template

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Filtering data is common in web apps to help users find what they want quickly, like filtering products by category.

💼 Career

Knowing django-filter helps you build user-friendly Django apps that handle data filtering efficiently, a valuable skill for backend and full-stack developers.

1

Create the Book model

Create a Django model called Book with two fields: title as CharField with max length 100, and genre as CharField with max length 50.

Django

# Define the Book model with title and genre fields
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use models.CharField for both fields with the specified max lengths.

2

Create the BookFilter class

Create a filter class called BookFilter that inherits from django_filters.FilterSet. Inside, create a Meta class that sets model = Book and fields = ['genre'].

Django

from django.db import models

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    genre = models.CharField(max_length=50)

# Create BookFilter class here
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Import django_filters and create a class that inherits from django_filters.FilterSet.

3

Create the book_list view

Create a Django view function called book_list that takes request as a parameter. Inside, create a BookFilter instance called book_filter using request.GET and Book.objects.all(). Then get the filtered queryset as books = book_filter.qs.

Django

import django_filters
from django.db import models

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    genre = models.CharField(max_length=50)

class BookFilter(django_filters.FilterSet):
    class Meta:
        model = Book
        fields = ['genre']

# Define book_list view here
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Import render from django.shortcuts. Use BookFilter(request.GET, queryset=Book.objects.all()) to filter.

4

Add the filter form to the template

In the template book_list.html, add the filter form by including {{ filter.form.as_p }} inside a <form> with method get. Below the form, loop over books and display each book's title and genre inside <li> tags.

Django

import django_filters
from django.db import models
from django.shortcuts import render

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    genre = models.CharField(max_length=50)

class BookFilter(django_filters.FilterSet):
    class Meta:
        model = Book
        fields = ['genre']

def book_list(request):
    book_filter = BookFilter(request.GET, queryset=Book.objects.all())
    books = book_filter.qs
    return render(request, 'book_list.html', {'filter': book_filter, 'books': books})


# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a <form method="get"> with {{ filter.form.as_p }} and a submit button. Loop over books with {% for book in books %}.