Notes
In this episode, I show you how to take a feature idea from nothing to something. We added new UI, wrote a new view, a new form, and all the associated test code to prove that the feature works.
My customer wants the ability to complete a task on any day she desires. The feature flow looks like:
- Click a calendar icon next to a task on a student’s course page.
- On the following page, add the desired date.
- Return to the student course page.
We began by adding the UI for the new button. I copied a link and changed the icon to a calendar icon. I also update the title tag for increased accessibility.
Once the button was ready, I created a URL and a view and started writing tests. By using the tests, we could follow the errors to fill in the details in the “error driven development” style that I sometimes use. I created a template and got the basic GET requests test passing.
With basic tests passing,
I moved onto some of the edge cases
and populated the context data
with the required data.
After setting the context,
I converted the view to a FormView.
By doing this conversion to a FormView,
we had to take a detour
to create a form
that the view can use.
I used pure Test-Driven Development
to create this new form
and drive the requirements
for it.
I wrote the clean method
to check the correctness
of the data.
I also wrote the save method
to update or create the right model instance.
Once the form was ready, I hooked it into the view and supplied all the correct data. With that done, I did some refactoring because the view was getting fairly messy. We ran out of time to do the template design of the feature by the end of the stream.