Databases
StackOverflow2013
Postsdbo
PO
 

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals
  1. PO
    primarykey
    data
    text
    <p>First, choosing between GET and POST: A user can simulate any kind of request, so POST will not help you there. When choosing between the two it is best to <em>decide based on the action the user is taking</em> or how they are interacting with your content. Are they getting a page or sending you data (a form is the obvious example)? For your case of retrieving some sort of post, GET is appropriate.</p> <p>Also worth noting, GET is the correct choice if the content is appropriate for bookmarking. Serving a URL based solely on the referrer -- as you say, "prevent users from manually entering a value for the id without having accessed it from a link" -- is a terrible idea. This will cause you innumerable headaches and it is probably not a nice experience for the user.</p> <p>As general principle, <strong>avoid relying on the primary key of a database record</strong>. That key (id=5 in your case) should be treated purely as an auto-increment field to prevent record collisions, i.e. you are guaranteed to always have a unique field for all records in the table. That ID field is a backend utility. Don't expose it to your users and don't rely on it yourself.</p> <p>If you can't use ID, what do you use? A common idiom is using the <strong>date</strong> of the record, a <strong>slug</strong> or both. If you are dealing with posts, use the published/created date. Then add a text field that will hold URL friendly and descriptive words. Call it a slug and read about Django's <a href="https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/fields/#slugfield" rel="nofollow">models.SlugField</a> for more information. Also, see the URL of an article on basically any news site. Your final URL will look something like <code>http://www.example.com/posts/2012/01/19/this-is-cool/</code></p> <p>Now your URL is friendly on the eyes, has Google-fu SEO benefits, is bookmark-able and isn't guessable. Because you aren't relying on a back-end database fixed arbitrary ID, you have the freedom to...restore a backup db dump, move databases, change the auto-increment number ID to a UUID hash, whatever. Only your database will care, not you as a programmer and not your users.</p> <p>Oh and don't over-worry about a user "requesting a record that doesn't exist" or "validating the requested id"...you have to do that anyway. It isn't consuming unnecessary resources. It is how a database-backed website works. You have to connect the request to the data. If the request is incorrect, you 404. Your webserver does it for non-existent URLs and you'll need to do it for non-existent data. Checkout Django's <a href="https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/shortcuts/#get-object-or-404" rel="nofollow">get_object_or_404()</a> for ideas/implementation.</p>
    singulars
    1. This table or related slice is empty.
    1. PODjango: preventing external query string requests
      singulars
      1. PTQuestion
    1. PTAnswer
    1. This table or related slice is empty.
    1. USJCotton
    plurals
    1. This table or related slice is empty.
    1. This table or related slice is empty.
    1. PODjango: preventing external query string requests
      singulars
      1. PTQuestion
    1. This table or related slice is empty.
    1. VO
      singulars
      1. PO
      1. This table or related slice is empty.
      1. VTUpMod
    2. VO
      singulars
      1. PO
      1. This table or related slice is empty.
      1. VTAcceptedByOriginator
    3. VO
      singulars
      1. PO
      1. This table or related slice is empty.
      1. VTUpMod
    1. CO+1 for not using the PK in the URL.
      singulars
      1. PO
      1. USDaniel Roseman
    2. COThanks, this gives me some direction.
      singulars
      1. PO
      1. USartful dodger
    3. COWhen using slugs how do you guarantee there won't be any collisions (i.e. two identical slugs for different ids)? I guess finer granularity in the time stamp would do it.
      singulars
      1. PO
      1. USartful dodger
 

Querying!

 
Guidance
A row detail

Detail views are divided into sections. All the information in the data section comes from columns in the selected row. The other sections display data from other, related rows.

Related data can be related in a to-one or a to-many fashion. Captions of data related in a to-many fashion link to a list view showing a filtered view of the table.

Try moving around until you find a non-empty to-many entry and click on the label to get to one. You can move back to the root by clicking on the database name in the header.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload