A small collection of Django view classes to build upon.
Project description
A small collection of base view classes to build upon. They are intended to handle a lot of the repetition in common view patterns and allow you to focus on what makes each view different. They were created by Brandon Konkle, and are used on some of the newer views at the Pegasus News and Daily You sites.
This is just the beginning, and I plan on expanding these classes and adding more to cover other common view patterns. Feel free to fork and send pull requests - I’d be happy to review and integrate contributions.
Installation
Use pip to install the module:
$ pip install django-baseviews
Then simply import it for use in your views:
import baseviews
Writing Views
Basic Views
The simplest views can be handled by creating a subclass of BasicView, defining the template attribute, and implementing the get_context method.
from baseviews import BasicView from lol.models import Cheezburger class LolHome(BasicView): template = 'lol/home.html' def get_context(self): return {'burgers': Cheezburger.objects.i_can_has()}
Caching the Context
If you’d like to cache the context through the low-level cache API, add the cache_key and cache_time attributes and override the cached_context method instead of the get_context method. Additionally, you can override uncached_context to add context that shouldn’t be cached. If cache_time isn’t set, it defaults to the arbitrary length of 5 minutes.
class LolHome(BasicView): template = 'lol/home.html' cache_key = 'lol_home' cache_time = 60*20 # 20 minutes def cached_context(self): return {'burgers': Cheezburger.objects.i_can_has()}
The cache_key attribute can include string formatting, which you can populate by overriding the get_cache_key method:
class LolDetail(BasicView): template = 'lol/detail.html' cache_key = 'lol_detail:%s' cache_time = 60*20 # 20 minutes def __call__(self, request, lol_slug): self.lol = Lol.objects.get(slug=lol_slug) return super(LolDetail, self).__call__(self, request) def get_cache_key(self): return self.cache_key % self.lol.slug
Ajax Views
The AjaxView class is a subclass of BasicView that takes the context and uses simplejson to dump it to a JSON object. If the view is not requested via Ajax, it raises an Http404 exception.
Decorators
Built-in decorators such as login_required don’t work by default with class-based views. This is because the first argument passed to the decorator is the class instance, not the request object. Todd Reed posted an excellent solution to this problem on his blog.
I’ve added his solution to baseviews as decorate. To decorate a class-view method, use decorate like this:
from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required from baseviews import decorate, BasicView class BucketFinder(BasicView): template = 'lol/wheres_mah_bucket.html' @decorate(login_required) def __call__(self, request): return super(BucketFinder, self).__call__(request)
Form Views
Form processing can be simplified with a subclass of the FormView class. Define an extra attribute called form_class and set it to the form you’d like to use, and define an attribute called success_url with the name of the url to be redirected to after successful form processing. You can also override the get_success_url method to provide a dynamic success url.
The most basic processing can be handled without any further effort. FormView will get the form and add it to the context, and if the request method is POST it will attempt to validate and save it.
If you would like to do more, you can extend the get_form and process_form methods:
class KittehView(FormView): form_class = KittehForm def __call__(self, request, kitteh_slug): self.kitteh = get_object_or_404(Kitteh, slug=kitteh_slug) return super(KittehView, self).__call__(request) def get_form(self): self.form_options = {'request': self.request, 'kitteh': self.kitteh} return super(KittehView, self).get_form() def process_form(self): if self.request.POST.get('edit', False): if self.form.is_valid(): self.form.save() return redirect(self.get_success_url()) elif self.request.POST.get('delete', False): self.kitteh.delete() return redirect('kitteh_deleted') def get_success_url(self): return reverse('kitteh_edited', args=[self.kitteh.slug])
Mapping the Views to URLs
In order to make the use of class attributes safe, views need to be mapped to urls using a view factory. The one in baseviews is borrowed from django-haystack.
from baseviews import view_factory from lol import views urlpatterns = patterns('', url(r'^$', view_factory(views.LolHome), name='lol_home'), )
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