How to Create Django Models now in just 5 Steps

A Django model is the built-in feature that Django uses to create SQL Database. SQL involves a lot of different complicated queries to Add, Create or Modify the Database. And here is where Django Models turn out to be really helpful. Django simplifies the task for us to create and manage the Databases.

For instance,

from django.db import models 
class Passengers(models.Model):     
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)     
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)

In this article, we will look into…

How to Create a Django Model
Add Attributes to the Models to represent a database field
Migrate the Models
Managing Models with Python Shell
Managing Models with Django Admin Interface

Now that you know what we are going to do, let’s jump right in

Creating Django Models

Import Models

#import Models from django.db
from django.db import models

First of all, you have to import models from Django.db into the models.py file

Although this import is been taken care of by Django

Create a New Model

#import models from django.db
from django.db import models

class Passengers(models.Model):
        pass

Now we have successfully created our new Django Model, for now, let’s only have pass inside the model class

Character Field

#import models from django.db
from django.db import models

class Passengers(models.Model):
        name = models.CharField(max_length=64)

Now we use this code to create a new character field for our model named name.

The parameter named max_length would create a limit for the number of characters that can be entered.

Text Field

#import models from django.db
from django.db import models

class Passengers(models.Model):
        name = models.CharField(max_length=64)
        description = models.TextField()

After that create a Text Field for description, although it is so absurd to ask passengers for a description

Hence let’s give it a parameter, blank = True , which simply means the user can leave this field blank

The difference between CharFields and TextFields is that in CharField we give a limit parameter, whereas TextField is used in the case where the user enters a multiline text.

DateTime Field

#import models from django.db
from django.db import models

class Passengers(models.Model):
        name = models.CharField(max_length=64)
        description = models.TextField(blank=True)
        departing_time = models.DateTimeField()

Now for the Date and Time let’s use DateTime

For automatically filling current date and time, we must use another parameter, auto_now_add = True

Migration

Whenever we make changes to our models.py, we have to migrate the models to see them in action. For this, we use 3 commands

First we makemigrations, we do this by running,

python3 manage.py makemigrations

After that, to check if we actually made the migrations, we must run

python3 manage.py showmigrations

Then the last step, migrate!

python3 manage.py migrate

Managing Django Models with Python Shell

That’s right, you can access and manage your Django Models within the python shell

To do this, first, we have to get into python shell, we do this by running the command

python3 manage.py shell

Once we’re in, we would have to import the model into the shell

from myapp.models import Passengers

Here, myapp is the app name and Passengers is the model’s name

Next, to add data, we must create a variable and store the value

passenger1 = Passengers(name="Geekalgo", description="")

passenger1.save()

We have successfully added data to our models using shell

Managing Models with Django Admin Interface

To render a model in Django admin, we need to modify app/admin.py. With Django’s admin interface, managing models become much simpler.

Register Django Models in Admin.py

Go to admin.py in myapp and enter the following code. Import the corresponding model from models.py and register it to the admin interface.

from django.contrib import admin 
from .models import Passengers

admin.site.register(Passengers)

Create Super User

By creating a superuser, you can log into Django’s Admin interface

python3 manage.py createsuperuser

Using Django’s Admin Interface

Run your Django server and go to http/127.0.0.1:8000/admin

Hurray! Now you are in your admin interface

To Sum Up

Today we discussed how to Create a Django Model, Add Attributes to the Models to represent a database field, Migrate the Models, Managing Models with Python Shell as well as with Django Admin Interface

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