My First Real Django Application

I had been kicking around a project in my head and how to do it with Django.  I was inspired by Justin Duke who posted http://jmduke.net/post/39316262948/from-concept-to-completion-in-four-hours to reddit.  This seemed like a good project for a Django newbie like me.  This whole project that I am outlining below can be found on GitHub.

The first thing I did was write the code to use the Twitter API to get the information I wanted.  I had never worked with JSON before but after a little trial and error I was able to open the search page and get the user, the text and the tweet url.  I am searching for "Python Programming" in the code below.

import urllib2
import json

search_term = 'python+programming'
search_count= '25'
twitter_search = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=' + search_term + '&rpp=' + search_count + '&result_type=mixed&lang=en'

response = urllib2.urlopen(twitter_search)
json_feed = json.load(response)
parent = json_feed["results"]

for item in parent:
    print item["from_user"]
    print item["text"]
    print https://twitter.com/' + item["from_user"] + '/status/' + str(item["id"])

The Model

Now I needed to create a Django model off these fields.  Since I am searching for Python programming I named the model PythonTweets:

from django.db import models

class PythonTweets(models.Model):
    tweetUsr = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    tweetText = models.CharField(max_length=500)
    tweetUrl = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField('date published')

The View

The view was pretty straight forward and mostly what was learned in the Polls tutorial.

# Create your views here.

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response

from tweeeter.models import PythonTweets

def python_search(request):

    latest_python_tweets = PythonTweets.objects.all().order_by('-pub_date')

    return render_to_response('tweeeter/python.html', {'latest_python_tweets': latest_python_tweets})

The Template

The template is just a test page to show the tweets.  I will pretty it up in a future blog post.

<h1>Test Python Page</h1>

{% if latest_python_tweets %}

    <ul>

    {% for ptweet in latest_python_tweets%}

        <li><a href="{{ ptweet.tweetUrl }}/">{{ ptweet.tweetText}}</a></li>

    {% endfor %}

    </ul>

{% else %}

    <p>No Tweets Available</p>

{% endif %}

Adding the tweets to the database

Since I write PL/SQL and SQL for a living I thought I would just write an SQL script and run it as a cron job.  I actually wrote a little bit of this and then face palm.  This is OOP and not SQL.  The objects attributes live in the database, all I have to do is instantiate new objects.  So all I have to do is loop through each tweet and create a new PythonTweet object.  Way too easy!  My plan now is to cron the script below to run once an hour or so to make sure I stay within the Twitter limits.  I still have to add some clean up to delete data from the database when it gets to a certain age.    

import urllib2

import json

from tweeeter.models import PythonTweets

from time import gmtime, strftime

todays_date = strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', gmtime())

#change below to customize the results

search_term = 'python+programming'

search_count= '25'

twitter_search = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=' + search_term + '&rpp=' + search_count + '&result_type=mixed&lang=en'

#open twitter and get what you want.

response = urllib2.urlopen(twitter_search)

json_feed = json.load(response)

#cycle through tweets, create objects and save.  

parent = json_feed["results"]

for item in parent:

    print item

    rds = PythonTweets(

    tweetUsr = (item["from_user"]),

    tweetText = (item["text"]),

    tweetUrl = ('https://twitter.com/' + item["from_user"] + '/status/' + str(item["id"])),

    pub_date = todays_date)

    rds.save()

What Else?

I had to add the new application to settings.py and update both urls.py.  If you need to see the code you can find it on my github account.  My next plan of attack on this is to add the cleanup of old data to the object creation script and pretty up the template.