Python app to django web app

I've written some python code to accomplish a task. Currently, there are 4-5 classes that I'm storing in separate files. I'd now like to change this whole thing into a database-backed web app. I've been reading tutorials on Django, and so far I get the impression that I'll need to manually specify the fields and their types for every "model" that I 开发者_StackOverflow社区use. This is a little surprising to me, since I was expecting some kind of ORM capability that would just take the existing classes I've already defined, and map them onto a database somehow, in a manner abstracted away from me.

Is this not the case? Am I missing something? It looks like I need to specify all the fields and types in the file 'models.py'.

Okay, now beyond those specifics, does anyone have any general tips on the best way to migrate an object-oriented desktop application to a web application?

Thanks!

That is Django's ORM: it maps classes to tables. What else did you expect? There needs to be some way of specifying what the fields are, though, before you can use them, and that's managed through the models.Model class and the various models.Field subclasses. You can certainly use your classes as mixins in order to use the existing business logic on top of the field definitions.

If you are thinking about a database backend based web app, you have to specify what fields of the data you want to store and what type of the value you want stored.

There is an abstraction that introspects the db to convert it into the django models.py format. But I know not of any that introspects a python class and stores arbitrary data into db. How would that even work? Are the objects, now, stored as a pickle?

You're going to have to check the output, but you can have Django automatically create models from existing databases through one-time introspection.

Taken from the link below, you would set up your database in settings.py, and then call

python manage.py inspectdb

This will dump the sample models.py file to standard out for your inspection. In order to create the file, simply redirect the output

python manage.py inspectdb > models.py

See for more:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/legacy-databases/?from=olddocs#auto-generate-the-models