What's the correct way to handle bad PKs?

Question

I tried putting everything in a single line:

article = get_object_or_404(articles, pk=pk)

But it didn't work either.

articles/views.py

from django.shortcuts import render, get_object_or_404

from .models import Article, Writer


def article_list(request):
    articles = Article.objects.all()
    return render(request, 'articles/article_list.html', {'articles': articles})


def writer_detail(request, pk):
    writer = Writer.objects.get(pk=pk)
    return render(request, 'articles/writer_detail.html', {'writer': writer})

def article_detail(request, pk):
    try:
        article = Article.objects.get(pk=pk)
    except:
        article = get_object_or_404(article, pk=pk)
    return render(request, 'articles/article_detail.html', {'article': article})

articles/urls.py

from django.conf.urls import url

from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'writer/(?P<pk>\d+)/$', views.writer_detail),
    url(r'article/(?P<pk>\d+)/$', views.article_detail),
    url(r'', views.article_list),
]

Answer 1 · 2015-07-16T21:52:49Z

July 16, 2015 9:52pm

A PK is like an ID that you can query results on based on some index within the model or database for intensive purposes.

pk=3 implies an ID of 3. So i can query results and get just the 3rd ID or index.

Now say my table only has 2 columns and I say PK=3. It will fail with things like list integer out of range. The best way to handle these is to catch the object class exceptions or since models are objects. you could try and catch ObjectDoesNotExist and a whole slew of other ones.. You can of course check for specifics in the documentation but unless you have a really large performance intensive project. No real need to worry about catching specific errors. Just catch em all.

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jeancruz

jeancruz

What's the correct way to handle bad PKs?

1 Answer

Ryan Ruscett

Ryan Ruscett