Online Auction App

This is an online auction app system, built with python django framework.

The app is live at: https://shifats-auction-app.herokuapp.com/

Steps Followed:

Step-1

1. Initialized the project and added an app named accounts. Configured the media folder for storing media files.

2. Designed the database models named AuctionProduct and Bidder for managing data. AuctionProduct has many-to-one relationship with the User model and Bidder has many-to-one relationship with AuctionProduct model.

3. Added the necessary views to the project for different relative routes.

4. Implemented the user login-registration system.

5. Styled the pages with css and bootstrap.

Step-2

1. Implemented a gallery view.
2. Added login restrictions to relevent pages.
3. Added a create button that gets the user to a form page to post a new auction item.
4. Added another functionality so that a user can place bids but not the post owner.

Step-3

1. Added functionality so that the users can interect the auciton posts with in auction end date and time.
2. During this time users can update or delete there bids.

Step-4

1. After an auction finishes the interactibility of the post will be disabled and the winner will be shown in the page.

Step-5

1. Added the appropriate routing for admin dashboard.
2. The admin dashboard is not completed as required yet.

Step-6

1. Added some custom styling with help of bootstrap 4 in different views. Though the forms are not styled yet.

Challanges Faced

1. Learnt django framework. Took help from youtube and the beautiful djnago documentation.
2. The very first challenge was user authentication system. I took help from youtube and django documentations to overcome this.
3. Used custom python wrapper to manage logged in users to not be able to go to login or registration pages.
4. In some cases reversing from a dynamic page to previous dynamic page is needed. For that I looked up in the official documentation how to implement this funciotnality.
5. Designing the database: I had some knowledge about how relational databases work and sql. So after spending some time in the documentation I was able to design the database for this project.
6. Database operations: Learnt how to do basic crud and querry operations on django models.
7. Upload image to server and render the image: At first it was not functioning correctly as expected. So I researced how to make it work in the internet. Several stack overflow posts helped me out here. I learned how POST method works for images and files works a bit differently than that for text/strings.
8. Though I have basic knowledge about html5 stack, I never worked with bootstrap before. I found out that bootstrap has a very well documentation and gained a better knowledge on bootstrap.
9. I learnt how I can add custom styling to django model form objects by modifiying the attributes using python code.
10. Timezones: used python pytz to match python's builtin datetime objects with django datetime objects. Timezone used Asia/Dhaka.
11. Deploying to Heroku.

Packages Used

1. Bootstrap for frontend styling
2. pytz for managing timezone. I used 'Asia/Dhaka'
3. Pillow for managing images
4. gunicorn and whitenoise for heroku deployment

Out Come

1. Learnt user authentication system
2. URL routings
3. Bootstrap
4. django database models
5. django forms
6. user specific url routing
7. managing static and media files
8. deployment to heroku
9. function base views
10. django templates
11. djnago models crud operations
12. working with date and time

Some References where I took help from

1. Django Documentation
2. Tech With Tim
3. Dennis Ivy
4. John Elder from codemy.com
5. Corey Schafer
6. Some Stack Overflow Searches:
   • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60128838/django-datetimeinput-type-datetime-local-not-saving-to-database
   • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4945802/how-can-i-disable-a-model-field-in-a-django-form
   • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2673647/enforce-unique-upload-file-names-using-django

Issues

As no external database service like aws is provided so DEBUG=False will not be able to handle the media files as expected. The reason why DEBUG=True is kept in the deployment.

Future Goals

1. Convert the view functions to class views to implement cleaner and more efficient code.
2. Complete the admin dashboard
3. Implement styling to the form views.

Sample User Credentials

username: shifat password: Brave1234

username: ashique password: Brave1234