Creating our first model

Now, we will create a simple Toy model in Django, which we will use to represent and persist toys. Open the toys/models.py file. The following lines show the initial code for this file with just one import statement and a comment that indicates we should create the models:

from django.db import models 
 
# Create your models here. 

The following lines show the new code that creates a Toy class, specifically, a Toy model in the toys/models.py file. The code file for the sample is included in the hillar_django_restful_02_01 folder in the restful01/toys/models.py file:

from django.db import models 
 
 
class Toy(models.Model): 
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True) 
    name = models.CharField(max_length=150, blank=False, default='') 
    description = models.CharField(max_length=250, blank=True, default='') 
    toy_category = models.CharField(max_length=200, blank=False, default='') 
    release_date = models.DateTimeField() 
    was_included_in_home = models.BooleanField(default=False) 
 
    class Meta: 
        ordering = ('name',)

The Toy class is a subclass of the django.db.models.Model class and defines the following attributes: created, name, description, toy_category, release_date, and was_included_in_home. Each of these attributes represents a database column or field.

We specified the field types, maximum lengths, and defaults for many attributes. The class declares a Meta inner class that declares an ordering attribute and sets its value to a tuple of string whose first value is the 'name' string. This way, the inner class indicates to Django that, by default, we want the results ordered by the name attribute in ascending order.