django-viewrouter 0.1.3

Rails style controller dispatch method for Django class based views. Instead of dispatching incoming http request to HTTP verbs such as 'GET', 'POST', 'DELETE' etc, it dispatch to more familiar CRUD action such as create, update, delete, and delete. For browser based apps, I found the CRUD action make more sense, after all in the browser we only limited to GET and POST so not much gain to split our request handler into proper HTTP method.

Installation

pip install https://github.com/k4ml/django-viewrouter/archive/refs/heads/main.zip

Usage

Create a view class like below:-

from django.http import HttpResponse
from viewrouter.views import ActionView

class ArticleView(ActionView):
    def index(self, request):
        return HttpResponse('this is index')

    def retrieve(self, request, pk):
        return HttpResponse('this is article %s' % pk)

    def delete(self, request, pk):
        return HttpResponse('deleting %s' % pk)

    def update(self, request, pk):
        return HttpResponse('updating %s' % pk)

Then in your urls.py:-

from django.urls import include, path
from viewrouter.routers import Router

from yourproject.views import ArticleView

article_router = Router(ArticleView)
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # Examples:
    # path('', 'myapp.views.home', name='home'),
    # path('blog/', include('blog.urls')),

    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('article/', article_router.urls)
)

The following url now accessible:-

• /article/
• /article/index/ (similar to above)
• /article/update//
• /article/retrieve//
• /article/delete//

We can also use the following shortcuts instead:-

    path('article/', ArticleView.get_urls())

By default the following methods on your class based views will be automatically routed:-

• index
• retrieve
• update
• delete
• create

Other methods can be routed by explicitly marking them with route decorator:-

from django.http import HttpResponse
from viewrouter.views import ActionView
from viewrouter.routers import route

class ArticleView(ActionView):
    def index(self):
        return HttpResponse('this is index')

    def retrieve(self, pk):
        return HttpResponse('this is article %s' % pk)

    @route(r'^set-password/(?<user_id>\d+)/')
    def set_password(self, user_id):
        return HttpResponse('change password for user %s' % user_id)

Unlike django built-in class based views which route based on HTTP methods, this will route all HTTP methods as long as the url pattern matched. To restrict the HTTP methods allowed, use http_methodsparameter to @route decorator:-

    @route(r'^set-password/(?<user_id>\d+)/', http_methods=['post'])
    def set_password(self, user_id):
        return HttpResponse('change password for user %s' % user_id)

Background

After start using class based views, I found our urls.py start getting cluttered with the boilerplate of wiring up the views into url patterns. And having split the views into proper http verbs, it mean we always need at least 2 separate views to handle the CRUD operation. For example:-

urlpatterns = patterns('',
        url(r'^article/$', ArticleView.as_view()),
        url(r'^article/(?P<pk>\d+)/$', ArticleEditorView.as_view()),
    )

Above, ArticleView will handle listing of articles and creating new one and ArticleEditorView will handle updating, displaying single article and deleting the article.