Updating the models for my Django Rest Framework API

I’ve been working on a Django project which would allow users to track games that they’ve seen and, therefore, see what stadia they have visited.

This is all being done at a site i set up called StadiaTracker.com. Initially when constructing my model I kept it relatively simple. I had one model that had two fields. The two fields tied the User from my CustomUser Model to a Game ID that I retrieve from an API that MLB provides.

I thought this simple approach would be the best approach. In addition to having a Django App I set up a Django Rest Framework (DRF) API. My initial plan was to have a DRF backend with a Vue (or React) front end. (I still want to do that, but I really wanted to try and finish a project before proceeding down that path).

After some development and testing I quickly realized that the page loads for the app were suffering because of the number of API calls to MLB that were being made.

I created a new model to tie the user id (still from the CustomUser model I’d created) to the game id, but in addition I’d get and store the following information:

• Home Team Name
• Home Team Score
• Home Team Hits
• Home Team Errors
• Away Team Name
• Away Team Score
• Away Team Hits
• Away Team Errors
• Game Recap Headline
• Game Recap Summary
• Game Date / Time

By storing all of this my views could render more quickly because they didn’t have to go to the MLB API to get the information.

Of course, once I did this I realized that the work I had done on the DRF API would also need to be updated.

Initially I kept putting off the refactoring that was going to have to be done. Finally, I just sat down and did it. And you know what, within 10 minutes I was done.

I only had to change 3 files:

• serializers.py
• urls.py
• views.py

For the searializers.py and views.py all I had to do was add the new model and then copy and paste what I had done for the previous model.

For the urls.py it was just a simple matter of updating the the DRF path and detail path to use the new views I had just created.

It was so amazingly simple I could barely believe it. This thing I had put off for a couple of weeks because I was afraid it was going to be really hard, just wasn’t.