Question

So, time for a newbie question but so utterly important since the documentation seems to have missed this very very basic example.

All I’m trying to do is to return a value from a model to a view in Django. Here is some code.

The model

class Page(models.Model):
    def index(self):
      ex = 'foo string'
      return ex

The view

def index(request):
    start = Page.objects.all().index
    #start = Page.index
    return render_to_response('index.html', {'page_content': start})

And, nothing gets rendered. I get this error message with <unbound method Page.index>

…

The funny thing is that if I skip the functions and so on and creates the model like this

class Page(models.Model):
    ex = 'goo string'

And call it with

start = Page.ex

Everything renders out fine.

Any pointer or working example would be much appreciated!
Thanks

Answer 1

This sort of thing is rightly left out of the Django tutorial, since it has nothing to do with Django. If you don’t know basic Python, then you need to follow a Python tutorial.

The main thing wrong with the code you gave is that you haven’t actually called the index method, you’ve just referred to it. In Python, as in many other languages, to call a method you need to use method(). So you need:

Page.objects.all()[0].index()