Calendar App - Part I

Today we’ll look at making a Calendar App. It will feature yearly, monthly, daily views; adding notes to dates, a settings screen, shared views for multiple users, and alerts for upcoming events; on the technical side, we’ll learn how to use formsets based on models. I hope you can think of a few things to add to the list of features as an exercise for yourself; I’ll throw in a few ideas at the end.

Defining the Model

Let’s start by defining the model class (in cal/models.py) — this time around the model is quite simple:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.contrib import admin


class Entry(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=40)
    snippet = models.CharField(max_length=150, blank=True)
    body = models.TextField(max_length=10000, blank=True)
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    date = models.DateField(blank=True)
    creator = models.ForeignKey(User, blank=True, null=True)
    remind = models.BooleanField(default=False)

    def __unicode__(self):
        if self.title:
            return unicode(self.creator) + u" - " + self.title
        else:
            return unicode(self.creator) + u" - " + self.snippet[:40]

    def short(self):
        if self.snippet:
            return "<i>%s</i> - %s" % (self.title, self.snippet)
        else:
            return self.title
    short.allow_tags = True

    class Meta:
        verbose_name_plural = "entries"


### Admin

class EntryAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ["creator", "date", "title", "snippet"]
    list_filter = ["creator"]

admin.site.register(Entry, EntryAdmin)

I have used the verbose_name_plural attribute to change the link to the list of entries in the Admin — otherwise Django tacks an ‘s’ to make a plural, ending up with “Entrys”.

As always, you should run manage.py syncdb; manage.py runserver to add tables and start Django.

Yearly View

Let’s go ahead and add the first view — it will display three years, starting with current, with a list of months for each year. The url, function and template will all be called main. Here are the urlconf lines and the function code:

(r"^(\d+)/$", "main"),
(r"", "main"),

import time
from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect, HttpResponse
from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404, render_to_response

from dbe.cal.models import *

mnames = "January February March April May June July August September October November December"
mnames = mnames.split()


@login_required
def main(request, year=None):
    """Main listing, years and months; three years per page."""
    # prev / next years
    if year: year = int(year)
    else:    year = time.localtime()[0]

    nowy, nowm = time.localtime()[:2]
    lst = []

    # create a list of months for each year, indicating ones that contain entries and current
    for y in [year, year+1, year+2]:
        mlst = []
        for n, month in enumerate(mnames):
            entry = current = False   # are there entry(s) for this month; current month?
            entries = Entry.objects.filter(date__year=y, date__month=n+1)

            if entries:
                entry = True
            if y == nowy and n+1 == nowm:
                current = True
            mlst.append(dict(n=n+1, name=month, entry=entry, current=current))
        lst.append((y, mlst))

    return render_to_response("cal/main.html", dict(years=lst, user=request.user, year=year,
                                                   reminders=reminders(request)))

The enumerate() function returns month numbers starting with 0; since all Python modules dealing with dates count months from 1, we need to increment n everywhere.

Our template will contain links to previous and next three years; starting year will be passed as an optional argument. We are creating a dictionary for each month, containing month number, name, whether it is current month and whether there are entries in it.

Let’s look at the template:

{% extends "cal/base.html" %}
<!-- ... -->

<a href="{% url cal.views.main year|add:'-3' %}">&lt;&lt; Prev</a>
<a href="{% url cal.views.main year|add:'3' %}">Next &gt;&gt;</a>

    {% for year, months in years %}
        <div class="clear"></div>
        <h4>{{ year }}</h4>
        {% for month in months %}
            <div class=
            {% if month.current %}"current"{% endif %}
            {% if not month.current %}"month"{% endif %} >
                {% if month.entry %}<b>{% endif %}
                <a href="{% url cal.views.month year month.n %}">{{ month.name }}</a>
                {% if month.entry %}</b>{% endif %}
            </div>

            {% if month.n == 6 %}<br />{% endif %}
        {% endfor %}
    {% endfor %}

I’m using base.html as the base template for the site — I won’t show it here because it’s almost the same as the ones we used in other tutorials.

The next and prev links make use of the add filter, which, (with some ingenuity), can also be used to subtract! Notice how we use the if tags to apply different styles to the same DIV element. Months that contain entries will be shown in bold; current month will have a light yellow background. I’ve used float: left css style to line up the months. Take a look:

After clicking Prev:

Continue to part II