Using FullCalendar with Django Views - django

Question

I'm trying to implement the FullCalendar on my website, but am a little new to this and not quite sure how to format what I want to do. I have a view which will grab all of an individual user's events. I want to take those events and populate the calendar with them. My issue is that I don't know what to return in the view or how to handle that return value in the JavaScript function. Here's what I have right now:
View:
def calEvents(request):
user = request.user.get_profile()
eventList = user.eventList
ownedList = user.ownedEvent
events = #Part I'm having trouble with
return HttpResponse(events)
The eventList and ownedEvent keep track of all of a user's events. They have names/dates associated with them. What I don't understand is the format I need to put all that information in to return in my HttpResponse.
My JavaScript function is:
$(document).ready(function() {
$('#calendar').fullCalendar({
eventSources: [
{
url: '/calEvents/',
editable: false,
}
]
});
});
I'm telling it to go to the Django view, but am lost after that. Thanks so much in advance!

Answer 1

I have done this by building a list of dictionaries in my Django view, setting at minimum the required fields of 'title' and the start time, then using simplejson.dumps with cls=DjangoJSONEncoder to return json.
from django.core.serializers.json import DjangoJSONEncoder
def calEvents(request):
# as above, then:
events = []
for event in eventList:
events.append({'title': event.name, 'start': event.start})
# something similar for owned events, maybe with a different className if you like
return HttpResponse(simplejson.dumps(events, cls=DjangoJSONEncoder), mimetype='application/json')
You may also with to limit the events you return based on the starting and ending times provided by the get request:
def calEvents(request):
user = request.user.get_profile()
start_timestamp = request.GET.get('start')
end_timestamp = request.GET.get('end')
start_datetime = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(float(start_timestamp))
end_datetime = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(float(end_timestamp))
eventList = user.eventList.filter(start_time__lte=end_datetime, end_time__gte=start_datetime)
I am neglecting error handling for the timestamp conversion - fullcalendar will give you appropriate values, but it would be best to allow for the possibility of bad input. And I am making assumptions about the structure of your event models.