Step 5: The View Functions

Now that the database connections are working we can start writing the view functions. We will need four of them:

Show Entries

This view shows all the entries stored in the database. It listens on the root of the application and will select title and text from the database. The one with the highest id (the newest entry) will be on top. The rows returned from the cursor are tuples with the columns ordered like specified in the select statement. This is good enough for small applications like here, but you might want to convert them into a dict. If you are interested in how to do that, check out the Easy Querying example.

The view function will pass the entries as dicts to the show_entries.html template and return the rendered one:

@app.route('/')
def show_entries():
    cur = g.db.execute('select title, text from entries order by id desc')
    entries = [dict(title=row[0], text=row[1]) for row in cur.fetchall()]
    return render_template('show_entries.html', entries=entries)

Add New Entry

This view lets the user add new entries if they are logged in. This only responds to POST requests, the actual form is shown on the show_entries page. If everything worked out well we will flash() an information message to the next request and redirect back to the show_entries page:

@app.route('/add', methods=['POST'])
def add_entry():
    if not session.get('logged_in'):
        abort(401)
    g.db.execute('insert into entries (title, text) values (?, ?)',
                 [request.form['title'], request.form['text']])
    g.db.commit()
    flash('New entry was successfully posted')
    return redirect(url_for('show_entries'))

Note that we check that the user is logged in here (the logged_in key is present in the session and True).

Security Note

Be sure to use question marks when building SQL statements, as done in the example above. Otherwise, your app will be vulnerable to SQL injection when you use string formatting to build SQL statements. See Using SQLite 3 with Flask for more.

Login and Logout

These functions are used to sign the user in and out. Login checks the username and password against the ones from the configuration and sets the logged_in key in the session. If the user logged in successfully, that key is set to True, and the user is redirected back to the show_entries page. In addition, a message is flashed that informs the user that he or she was logged in successfully. If an error occurred, the template is notified about that, and the user is asked again:

@app.route('/login', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def login():
    error = None
    if request.method == 'POST':
        if request.form['username'] != app.config['USERNAME']:
            error = 'Invalid username'
        elif request.form['password'] != app.config['PASSWORD']:
            error = 'Invalid password'
        else:
            session['logged_in'] = True
            flash('You were logged in')
            return redirect(url_for('show_entries'))
    return render_template('login.html', error=error)

The logout function, on the other hand, removes that key from the session again. We use a neat trick here: if you use the pop() method of the dict and pass a second parameter to it (the default), the method will delete the key from the dictionary if present or do nothing when that key is not in there. This is helpful because now we don’t have to check if the user was logged in.

@app.route('/logout')
def logout():
    session.pop('logged_in', None)
    flash('You were logged out')
    return redirect(url_for('show_entries'))

Continue with Step 6: The Templates.