Question

Greetings
I am hacking Django and trying to test something such as:

Like woot.com , I want to sell “an item per day”, so only one item will be available for that day (say the default http://www.mysite.com will be redirected to that item),

Assume my urls for calling these items will be such: www.mysite.com/item/<number>

my model for item:

class Item(models.Model):
        item_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
        price = models.FloatField()
        content = models.TextField() #keeps all the html content
        start_time = models.DateTimeField()
        end_time = models.DateTimeField()

And my view for rendering this:

def results(request, item_id):
    item = get_object_or_404(Item, pk=item_id)
 now = datetime.now()

    if item.start_time > now:
     #render and return some "not started yet" error templete
 elif item.end_time < now:
     #render and return some "item selling ended" error templete
 else:
     # render the real templete for selling this item

What would be the efficient and clever model & templete for achieving this ?

Answer 1

It seems you’ve got the basics figured out, so I’m assuming you’re asking for polishing suggestions… A few ideas in this vein:

1. I think I’d have a separate URL like /items/today/ for this, or perhaps just /today/.

2. You’ll want to use the date components of datime.datetime.now() only. The whole thing is an object containing the current time specified to a microsecond’s precision.

3. How about using a single base template for all three cases and inheriting from it to change a block containing either the button to click on when buying, the price etc., or a note saying that the item is not being sold yet / any more. Then people can still use the numbered URLs when saying things like See what I bought yesterday, you have to go to that site in an e-mail. 😉