This post follows up on my earlier post about storing json data in Postgres. In this article, I will be going over how to integrate the same JSONB data I used in that post with a Django web application.

Modeling the Data

Modeling JSONB data with Django’s ORM tool is rather easy, as the framework has built in support for this in the django.contrib module. Therefore, we would model our data like this in our models.py file:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.postgres.fields import JSONField


# Create your models here.
class Textbook(models.Model):

    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    properties = JSONField()

    def __str__(self):
        
        return self.title

Creating a View

In this example, I will be using Django’s class-based ListView to simplify our view logic. As such, the view will simply look like this:

from django.views.generic import ListView
from .models import Textbook


# List all textbooks
class IndexView(ListView):

    model = Textbook
    template_name = 'books/index.html'
    context_object_name = 'books'
    ordering = ['-title']

    def get_queryset(self):

        return Textbook.objects.all()

Templating

Templating JSONB data in Django works very much like templating non-JSON data, which I apparently cannot show the code for here, because Jekyll (which this blog uses) seems to confuse the Django template language for its own templating language. To see the template code, check here.

Final Thoughts

This would certainly be considerably more difficult to implement without Django’s built-in support for Postgres’ JSONB type. However, given that Django does have built in support for this, it was about as easy as working with SQL data. Going forward, I would like to implement more complete CRUD functionality. Stay tunned.