US-RSE'24 Pre-Conference Tutorial: Leveraging Django Views and Permissions at Object-Level

Web applications are increasingly adopted in the research community, e.g. for data collection, information dissemination and workflow management. Django is a Python-based open-sourced web framework that encourages rapid development by providing an automatic admin interface, built-in views and forms. This Django tutorial is based on a simplified version of a real-life, science-related project, that limits access to datasets only to the research group that collected them. A data owner would be able to supply all necessary metadata and choose an embargo period in which the data only has limited access. The tutorial will guide RSEs to create a web application from scratch and show how to take advantage of Django’s generic views. In addition to Django’s class-level permissions, we will demonstrate an implementation of permissions at the object level using the django-guardian package. Slides accompanying the code will illustrate the project under development with Use Cases as well as a conceptual class diagram and other artifacts.
For a hands-on experience, participants should have access to a terminal (readily available on GNU/Linux and macOS, WSL recommended, if on Windows) with Python and Git installed.