How to structure views for database pulling and manipulation - django

Question

I am having difficulties understanding how best to structure my views.
I am pulling data on various users and creating variables that summarise some of these variables (such as occurrences per week etc). This is so I can graph these summary variables in my templates. I am doing quite a lot of different manipulations which is getting quite messy , and i shall need these manipulations for other templates. Can somebody recommend how best to structure views in this case. I think using classes is the solution to use the same functions for other templates but I cannot quite understand how. I also feel there must be a better way to structure each manipulation of database data.
def dashboard(request):
posts= Post.objects.filter(user=request.user)
posts_count = posts.count()
post_early = Post.objects.filter(user=request.user).earliest('date') #need to extract the date value from this so I can take the difference
total_days = (datetime.datetime.now().date()- post_early.date).days
average_30days= round((posts_count/total_days)*30,2)
list4=[]
list5=[]
i=1
time3=datetime.datetime.now() + datetime.timedelta(-30)
while i<32:
list4.append(days2(time3,request,Post))
list5.append(time3.strftime('%b %d, %Y'))
i+=1
time3=time3 + datetime.timedelta(+1)

Answer 1

def dashboardView(request):
posts = Post.objects.filter(user=request.user)
posts_count = posts.count()
#need to extract the date value from post_early so I can take the difference
post_early = Post.objects.filter(user=request.user).earliest('date')
total_days = (datetime.datetime.now().date() - post_early.date).days
average_30days = round((posts_count/total_days)*30,2)
list_4 = []
list_5 = []
i = 1
time_3=datetime.datetime.now() + datetime.timedelta(-30)
while i<32:
list_4.append(days2(time_3, request, Post))
list_5.append(time_3.strftime('%b %d, %Y'))
i += 1
time_3 = time_3 + datetime.timedelta(1)
I'd do something like this. There were a few inconsistency:
-keep a space before and a space after operators (=, *, -, +, ...).
-I'd consider a good practice to always suffix -View to your views, but it's just personal preference
-Use empty lines to separate blocks of code, not groups of variables. If you have a long list of variables declarations (not this case) you can use comments to separate and categorize them.
-Use list_3 instead of list3 (and similar cases), it's more readable.
For more you can always check the official python style guide: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
Anyway, if you're consistent and attain to the coding style used in the Django documentation while learning, you'll be fine.
##### EDIT:
Note: my answer is based on the code you provided, which seems cut (no return statement?) and without the other modules.
You're using a function based view which is not wrong nor correct, just one of the possible choices. If you don't like it, or want to try something else, a ListView may work for you: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/topics/class-based-views/generic-display/
Example:
from django.views import ListView
class DashboardView(ListView):
model = Post
def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
context = super().get_context_data(**kwargs)
context['posts'] = Post.objects.filter(user=request.user)
# add all the data you need to the context dictionary
return context