Styjun

I am having difficulties understanding how best to structure my views.
I am pulling data on various users and creating variables that summarise some of these variables (such as occurrences per week etc). This is so I can graph these summary variables in my templates. I am doing quite a lot of different manipulations which is getting quite messy , and i shall need these manipulations for other templates. Can somebody recommend how best to structure views in this case. I think using classes is the solution to use the same functions for other templates but I cannot quite understand how. I also feel there must be a better way to structure each manipulation of database data.

def dashboard(request):

 posts= Post.objects.filter(user=request.user)
 posts_count = posts.count()
 post_early = Post.objects.filter(user=request.user).earliest('date') #need to extract the date value from this so I can take the difference

 total_days = (datetime.datetime.now().date()- post_early.date).days

 average_30days= round((posts_count/total_days)*30,2)

 list4=[]
 list5=[]
 i=1
 time3=datetime.datetime.now() + datetime.timedelta(-30)

 while i<32:

 list4.append(days2(time3,request,Post))
 list5.append(time3.strftime('%b %d, %Y'))
 i+=1
 time3=time3 + datetime.timedelta(+1)

def dashboardView(request):
 posts = Post.objects.filter(user=request.user)
 posts_count = posts.count()
 #need to extract the date value from post_early so I can take the difference
 post_early = Post.objects.filter(user=request.user).earliest('date') 
 total_days = (datetime.datetime.now().date() - post_early.date).days
 average_30days = round((posts_count/total_days)*30,2)
 list_4 = []
 list_5 = []
 i = 1
 time_3=datetime.datetime.now() + datetime.timedelta(-30)

 while i<32:
 list_4.append(days2(time_3, request, Post))
 list_5.append(time_3.strftime('%b %d, %Y'))
 i += 1
 time_3 = time_3 + datetime.timedelta(1)

I'd do something like this. There were a few inconsistency:

-keep a space before and a space after operators (=, *, -, +, ...).

-I'd consider a good practice to always suffix -View to your views, but it's just personal preference

-Use empty lines to separate blocks of code, not groups of variables. If you have a long list of variables declarations (not this case) you can use comments to separate and categorize them.

-Use list_3 instead of list3 (and similar cases), it's more readable.

For more you can always check the official python style guide: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

Anyway, if you're consistent and attain to the coding style used in the Django documentation while learning, you'll be fine.

Note: my answer is based on the code you provided, which seems cut (no return statement?) and without the other modules.

You're using a function based view which is not wrong nor correct, just one of the possible choices. If you don't like it, or want to try something else, a ListView may work for you: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/topics/class-based-views/generic-display/

Example:

from django.views import ListView

class DashboardView(ListView):
 model = Post

 def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
 context = super().get_context_data(**kwargs)
 context['posts'] = Post.objects.filter(user=request.user)
 # add all the data you need to the context dictionary
 return context