Q:

Django code organisation

I've recently started working with Django.  I'm working on an existing Django/Python based site. In particular I'm implementing some functionality to create and display a PDF document when a particular URL is hit. I have an entry in the app's urls file that routes to a function in the views file and the PDF generation is working fine.
However, the view function is pretty big and I want to extract the code out somewhere to keep my view as thin as possible, but I'm not sure of the best/correct approach.  I'll probably need to generate other PDFs in due course so would it make sense to create a 'pdfs' app and put code in there?  If so, should it go in a model or view?
In a PHP/CodeIgniter environment for example I would put the code into a model, but models seem to be closely linked to database tables in Django and I don't need any db functionality for this.
Any pointers/advice from more experienced Django users would be appreciated.
Thanks

A:

If you plan to scale your project, I would suggest moving it to a separate app. Generally speaking, generating PDFs based on an url hit directly is not the best thing to do performance-wise. Generating a PDF file is pretty heavy on you server, so if multiple people do it at the same time, the performance of your system will suffer. 
As a first step, just put it in a separate class, and execute that code from the view. At some point you will probably want to do some permission checks etc - that stays in the view, while generation of the PDF itself will be cleanly separated.
Once you test your code, scale etc - then you can substitute that one line call in the view into putting the PDF generation in a queue and only pulling it once it's done - that will allow you to manage your computing powers better.

