Question

I am currently working through the tutorial on Django’s website. Upon completing the following command:

python manage.py startapp polls

it creates the following structure:

polls/
    __init__.py
    models.py
    tests.py
    views.py

As I was going through the tutorial it occurred to me that the views file could grow to this huge incohesive monolithic file that has every action in the entire web application.

Is there a way to break this file up into cohesive classes or files? I tried changing the settings.py and the url.py to point to a different directory, but it appears that the script that generates the file structure creates a “views” module when it creates the file, and I don’t see a way to change/override this behavior from the script.

Answer 1

Each app you create for the project will have its own views.py file (assuming it uses views), so you don’t need to worry about it becoming monolithic.

Just make sure to keep your apps’ functionality focused.

From the Django docs:

Projects vs. apps

What’s the difference between a
project and an app? An app is a Web
application that does something —
e.g., a weblog system, a database of
public records or a simple poll app. A
project is a collection of
configuration and apps for a
particular Web site. A project can
contain multiple apps. An app can be
in multiple projects.