6. Catalog Views

Now that we know how to create product models and how to administer them, lets have a look on how to route them to our views.

When editing the CMS page used for the products list view, open Advanced Settings and choose Products List from the select box labeled Application.

Then choose a template with at least one placeholder. Click onto View on site to change into front-end editing mode. Locate the main placeholder and add a Row followed by a Column plugin from the section Bootstrap. Below that column add a Catalog List Views plugin from section Shop. Then publish the page, it should not display any products yet.

6.1. Add products to the category

Open the detail view of a product in Django’s administration backend. Locate the many-to-many select box labeled Categories > Cms pages. Select the pages where each product shall appear on.

On reloading the list view, the assigned products now shall be visible. Assure that they have been set to be active, otherwise they won’t show up.

If you nest categories, products assigned to children will be also be visible on their parents pages.

6.1.1. Product Model Serializers

We already learned how to write model classes and model managers, so what are serializers for?

In django-SHOP the response views do not distinguish whether the product’s information shall be rendered as HTML or transferred via JSON. This gives us the ability to use the same business logic for web browsers rendering static HTML, single page web applications communicating via AJAX or native shopping applications for your mobile devices. This btw. is one of the great benefits when working with RESTful API’s and thanks to the djangorestframework we don’t even have to write any Django Views anymore.

For instance, try to open the list- or the detail view of any of the products available in the shop. Then in the browsers URL input field append ?format=api or ?format=json to the URL. This will render the pure product information, but without embedding it into HTML.

The REST API view is very handy while developing. If you want to hide this on your production system , then in your settingy.py remove 'rest_framework.renderers.BrowsableAPIRenderer' from REST_FRAMEWORK['DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES'].

In the shop’s catalog, we need some functionality to render a list view for all products and we need a detail view to render each product type. The django-SHOP framework supplies two such serializers:

6.2. Serialize for the Products List View

For each product we want to display in a list view, we need a serializer which converts the content of the most important fields of a product. Normally these are the Id, the name and price, the URL onto the detail view, a short description and a sample image.

The django-SHOP framework does not know which of those fields have to be serialized, therefore it requires some help from the programmer:

myshop/product_serializers.py
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from shop.serializers.bases import BaseProductSummarySerializer
from myshop.models.polymorphic.product import Product

class ProductSummarySerializer(BaseProductSummarySerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Product
        fields = ('id', 'product_name', 'product_url',
            'product_type', 'product_model', 'price')

All these fields can be extracted directly from the product model with the exception of the sample image. This is because we yet do not know the final dimensions of the image inside its HTML element such as <img src="...">, and we certainly want to resize it using PIL/Pillow before it is delivered. An easy way to solve this problem is to use the SerializerMethodField. Simply extend the above class to:

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from rest_framework.serializers import SerializerMethodField

class ProductSummarySerializer(BaseProductSummarySerializer):
    media = SerializerMethodField()

    def get_media(self, product):
        return self.render_html(product, 'media')

As you might expect, render_html assigns a HTML snippet to the field media in the serialized representation of our product. This method uses a template to render the HTML. The name of this template is constructed using the following rules:

  • Look for a folder named according to the project’s name, ie. settings.SHOP_APP_LABEL in lower case. If no such folder can be found, then use the folder named shop.
  • Search for a subfolder named products.
  • Search for a template named “label-product_type-postfix.html”. These three subfieds are determined using the following rule: * label: the component of the shop, for instance catalog, cart, order. * product_type: the class name in lower case of the product’s Django model, for instance smartcard, smartphone or if no such template can be found, just product. * postfix: This is an arbitrary name passed in by the rendering function. As in the example above, this is the string media.

Note

It might seem “un-restful” to render HTML snippets by a REST serializer and deliver them via JSON to the client. However, we somehow must re-size the images assigned to our product to fit into the layout of our list view. The easiest way to do this in a configurable manner is to use the easythumbnails library and its templatetag {% thumbnail product.sample_image ... %}.

The template to render the media snippet could look like:

myshop/products/catalog-smartcard-media.html
{% load i18n thumbnail djng_tags %}
{% thumbnail product.sample_image 100x100 crop as thumb %}
<img src="{{ thumb.url }}" width="{{ thumb.width }}" height="{{ thumb.height }}">

The template of the products list view then may contain a list iteration such as:

{% for product in data.results %}
  <div class="shop-list-item">
    <a href="{{ product.product_url }}">
      <h4>{{ product.product_name }}</h4>
        {{ product.media }}
        <strong>{% trans "Price" %}: {{ product.price }}</strong>
    </a>
  </div>
{% endfor %}

The tag {{ product.media }} inserts the HTML snippet as prepared by the serializer from above. A serializer may add more than one SerializerMethodField. This can be useful, if the list view shall render different product types using different snippet templates.

6.3. Serialize for the Product’s Detail View

The serializer for the Product’s Detail View is very similar to its List View serializer. In the example as shown below, we even reverse the field listing by explicitly excluding the fields we’re not interested in, rather than naming the fields we want to include. This for the product’s detail view makes sense, since we want to expose every possible detail.

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from shop.serializers.bases import BaseProductDetailSerializer

class ProductDetailSerializer(BaseProductDetailSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Product
        exclude = ('active',)

6.4. The AddToCartSerializer

Rather than using the detail serializer, the business logic for adding a product to the cart has been moved into a specialized serializer. This is because django-SHOP can not presuppose that products are added to the cart only from within the detail view [1]. We also need a way to add more than one product variant to the cart from each products detail page.

For this purpose django-SHOP is shipped with an AddToCartSerializer. It can be overridden for special product requirements, but for a standard application it just should work out of the box.

Assure that the context for rendering a product contains the key product referring to the product object. The ProductDetailSerializer does this by default. Then add

{% include "shop/catalog/product-add2cart.html" %}

to an appropriate location in the template which renders the product detail view.

The now included add-to-cart template contains a form with some input fields and a few AngularJS directives, which communicate with the endpoint connected to the AddToCartSerializer. It updates the subtotal whenever the customer changes the quantity and displays a nice popup window, whenever an item is added to the cart. Of course, that template can be extended with arbitrary HTML.

These Angular JS directives require some JavaScript code which is located in the file shop/js/catalog.js; it is referenced automatically when using the above template include statement.

[1]Specially in business-to-business sites, this usually is done in the list views.

6.4.1. Connect the Serializers with the View classes

Now that we declared the serializers for the product’s list- and detail view, the final step is to access them through a CMS page. Remember, since we’ve chosen to use CMS pages as categories, we had to set a special django-CMS apphook:

myshop/cms_apps.py
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from cms.app_base import CMSApp
from cms.apphook_pool import apphook_pool

class ProductsListApp(CMSApp):
    name = _("Products List")
    urls = ['myshop.urls.products']

apphook_pool.register(ProductsListApp)

This apphook points onto a list of boilerplate code containing these urlpattern:

myshop/urls/products.py
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from django.conf.urls import url
from rest_framework.settings import api_settings
from shop.rest.filters import CMSPagesFilterBackend
from shop.rest.serializers import AddToCartSerializer
from shop.views.catalog import (CMSPageProductListView,
    ProductRetrieveView, AddToCartView)

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^$', CMSPageProductListView.as_view(
        serializer_class=ProductSummarySerializer,
    )),
    url(r'^(?P<slug>[\w-]+)$', ProductRetrieveView.as_view(
        serializer_class=ProductDetailSerializer
    )),
    url(r'^(?P<slug>[\w-]+)/add-to-cart', AddToCartView.as_view()),
]

These URL patterns connect the product serializers with the catalog views in order to assign them an endpoint. Additional note: The filter class CMSPagesFilterBackend is used to restrict products to specific CMS pages, hence it can be regarded as the product categoriser.