The Model-View-Template (MVT) is a design pattern used in Django, a Python-based web framework. This pattern is a principal concept that neatly segregates an application into three interconnected components. The primary objective of this pattern is to separate the application logic from the user interface.
In Django, the MVT pattern works like the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern but with some slight differences. The key difference is that Django takes care of the Controller part itself. The developer only needs to focus on the Models, Views, and Templates.
1. Model: The Model is going to act as the interface of your data. It is responsible for maintaining data. It is essentially a Python object that maps to a database table. Each attribute represents a database field. Django models provide a simple and consistent method for querying the database. Django Models API automatically creates SQL queries and retrieves the required data by executing those queries (Django Documentation, 2022).
1. View: The View is where the logic goes. It serves as a bridge between models and templates. It’s designed to receive HTTP requests from users, execute the necessary logic (often involving fetching data from the database using Models), and return HTTP responses to the user. The View may call one or several Models and Templates (Django Documentation, 2022).
1. Template: The Template is the part that formats the output. It can be understood as a method to separate the HTML/CSS/JavaScript code from Python code. Django uses its own templating engine, but also fully supports third-party templating engines such as Jinja2, Mako, etc. Django’s templating engine allows for variable substitutions and tags, which makes designing the user interface simpler (Django Documentation, 2022).
As for an example of MVT in Django, considering a blog website, in “Model,” you might have a “Post” model with fields for title, content, and publication date. Then, in “View,” you would have a function or class-based view that collects the list of all “Post” objects and passes it to a template. That “Template,” finally, would be an HTML file that knows how to display Post objects.
In conclusion, MVT is a software design pattern that fosters efficient and maintainable code structure by separating an application into three main components: Models, Views, and Templates.
Sources:
1. “Models”, Django Documentation, Available at: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/topics/db/models/.
2. “Views and Templates”, Django Documentation, Available at: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/topics/http/views/
3. “Templates”, Django Documentation, Available at: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/topics/templates/.
