Django queryset dates: aggregate and format months as name strings

I've got a simple blog application which I'm porting to Django. One stumbling block I've come across is the aggregation of article entries by month, and displaying that as a list. Each article in the db has a simple datetime field. The HTML output should be something like:

2010

• January (3 entries)
• February (2 entries)
• March (3 entries)

etc.

I'm currently using a {% foreach %} block in the template to lo开发者_C百科op through all the months returned from the query.

Going with dates('datestamp','month') seems to be the right direction, but how do I get article counts in the results, and how would I format the month integers to be name strings in the template?

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You can use django-cube for this. With the following code in your views.py (and then connect entry_count in your urls), you should get what you need :

# cube declaration
from cube.models import Cube, Dimension

class EntryCube(Cube):

    #replace <your_date_field> by the field name
    month = Dimension('<your_date_field>__month') 
    year = Dimension('<your_date_field>__year')

    @staticmethod
    def aggregation(queryset):
        return queryset.count()

# views declaration
from .models import <YourModel> #replace by your model
from cube.views import table_from_cube

def entry_count(request):
    cube = EntryCube(<YourModel>.objects.all())
    return table_from_cube(request, cube, ['year', 'month'], template='table.html')
    #template 'table.html' is in 'example/template' folder, copy it in your template folder, and modify it to your wish.

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EDIT :

If you want to customize the way dimensions are displayed, you can just subclass Dimension (see this snippet):

class MonthDimension(Dimension):

    @property
    def pretty_constraint(self):
        #just return the month name according to the month number that you can get in "self.constraint", e.g. self.constraint = 1 -> return 'january'
        return month_name

(I plan to provide subclasses of dimensions to allow different formats like what you need. So if you do use django-cube, and write a good subclass of Dimension to format dates, I would be happy to take a look at it !)

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Ok ... it is overkill for what you want. However, if you decide after that you want more statistics on your entries (for example number of entries/author/month/year/tag, etc ...), you simply add a dimension to the cube. If you decide to use this, and need more help, please ask !