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.