Question

I’m using the Tornado framework (Python) on GAE. I’m still kind of new to the whole MVC concept and GAE… and having a dang of a time trying to figure out how to do this.

I have a table (model) Post with the fields user, text, creation_date.

I pull all the posts in the code and then send it to the template. I want to format the creation_date field so it’s formatted a bit nicer. Something like M-d-Y. I know I use strptime or strftime to format the creation_date. But I’m not sure how to do it before I send posts to the template.

Here is what I use to get the posts and send it to the template…

class HomeHandler(BaseHandler):
    def get(self):
        posts = Post.all()
        posts.order("-creation_date")
        self.render('home.html', posts=posts)

UPDATE:

posts = Post.all().order("-creation_date").fetch(50)
posts = [{'text': post.text} for post in posts]
for post in posts:
        print post.text

Error message I get:

AttributeError: ‘dict’ object has no attribute ‘text’

Answer 1

Assuming you are using Tornado’s template module, it includes the datetime module. I have not used Tornado’s template module, but you should be able to use:

entity.datetime_property.strftime('%m-%d-%y')

If you want to process your models before sending them to the template try something like:

class HomeHandler(BaseHandler):
  def get(self):
    posts = Post.all().order("-creation_date").fetch(50)
    posts = [{'author': post.author,
              'subject': post.subject,
              'date': post.date} for post in posts]
    self.render('home.html', posts=posts)

Within your template posts will be a list of dictionaries containing the fields author, subject, and date.

Use fetch to limit the number of posts you return; it will improve performance by grabbing (up to) 50 entities at once instead of grabbing them in smaller batches.