ORM improvements¶

Two major enhancements have been added to Django’s object-relational mapper (ORM):

Performance improvements¶

Tests written using Django’s testing framework now run dramatically faster (as much as 10 times faster in many cases).

This was accomplished through the introduction of transaction-based tests: when using django.test.TestCase, your tests will now be run in a transaction which is rolled back when finished, instead of by flushing and re-populating the database. This results in an immense speedup for most types of unit tests. See the documentation for TestCase and TransactionTestCase for a full description, and some important notes on database support.

Other improvements¶

Other new features and changes introduced since Django 1.0 include:

• The CSRF protection middleware has been split into two classes – CsrfViewMiddleware checks incoming requests, and CsrfResponseMiddleware processes outgoing responses. The combined CsrfMiddleware class (which does both) remains for backwards-compatibility, but using the split classes is now recommended in order to allow fine-grained control of when and where the CSRF processing takes place.
• reverse() and code which uses it (e.g., the {% url %} template tag) now works with URLs in Django’s administrative site, provided that the admin URLs are set up via include(admin.site.urls) (sending admin requests to the admin.site.root view still works, but URLs in the admin will not be “reversible” when configured this way).
• The include() function in Django URLconf modules can now accept sequences of URL patterns (generated by patterns()) in addition to module names.
• Instances of Django forms (see the forms overview now have two additional methods, hidden_fields() and visible_fields(), which return the list of hidden – i.e., <input type="hidden"> – and visible fields on the form, respectively.
• The redirect_to generic view (see the generic views documentation) now accepts an additional keyword argument permanent. If permanent is True, the view will emit an HTTP permanent redirect (status code 301). If False, the view will emit an HTTP temporary redirect (status code 302).
• A new database lookup type – week_day – has been added for DateField and DateTimeField. This type of lookup accepts a number between 1 (Sunday) and 7 (Saturday), and returns objects where the field value matches that day of the week. See the full list of lookup types for details.
• The {% for %} tag in Django’s template language now accepts an optional {% empty %} clause, to be displayed when {% for %} is asked to loop over an empty sequence. See the list of built-in template tags for examples of this.