django-viewsets 0.1.4

Avoid boring views and urls.

Contents

• Problematic

• Solution

• Installation

• Usage

  • Attributes

Problematic

When having a look at Ruby on Rails, I discovered a nice feature that was missing in Django: controllers. Contrary to what I often read, views in Django are not really equivalent to controllers in Rails. A Rails controller basically is a set of Django views and Django URL patterns. Apart from driving off boring URL work, this is a clean way to group views that belongs to the same model.

Any good djangonaut would make the connection with generic views − especially class-based. This is the easiest solution to avoid repeating the same code with a few changes. But this is not simplifying URL patterns and we often have to define such files:

# views.py
from django.views.generic import ListView, DetailView  # and so on…
from .models import Example


class ExampleListView(ListView):
    model = Example


class ExampleDetailView(DetailView):
    model = Example

# and so on…

# urls.py
from django.conf.urls import patterns, url
from .views import *


urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url('^examples/$', ExampleListView.as_view(), name='example_index'),
    url('^examples/(?P<pk>\d+)$', ExampleDetailView.as_view(),
        name='example_detail'),
    # and so on…
)

With a single model, this looks easy. With complex applications containing dozens of models, this looks painful − and definitely not DRY [1].

Solution

django-viewsets proposes a solution inspired of Rails controllers. ViewSet is a class that builds a set of URL patterns from a set of class-based generic views. It is designed to be overridable, so that it fits standard as well as advanced use.

Installation

[sudo] pip install django-viewsets

You don’t have to change your project settings.py.

Usage

ModelViewSet

In your application views.py:

from viewsets import ModelViewSet
from .models import YourModel

class YourModelViewSet(ModelViewSet):
    model = YourModel

In your application urls.py:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, url, include
from .views import YourModelViewSet

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url('', include(YourModelViewSet().urls)),
)

That’s it! ModelViewSet provides you these views and urls − based on the model verbose_name_plural:

Generic view	URL	URL name
ListView	your-models/	your-model_index
DetailView	your-models/[pk]	your-model_detail
CreateView	your-models/create	your-model_create
UpdateView	your-models/[pk]/update	your-model_update
DeleteView	your-models/[pk]/delete	your-model_delete

Attributes

views

Dictionary defining views and URLs. CRUD [2] by default.

base_url

Overrides your-models in all URLs. Calculated from model._meta.verbose_name_plural if unset.

excluded_views

A sequence of keys from the views. Unset by default. Example: ('create_view', 'delete_view',).

namespace

Set this if your application has a URL namespace. It is used to redirect to main_view in delete_view. You can also set main_url.

main_view

Used to calculate main_url. 'list_view' by default.

main_url

The main url where delete_view redirects. If set, main_view is ignored.

model_slug

Used to construct URL names. Calculated from model._meta.verbose_name if unset.

[1]

Don’t Repeat Yourself

[2]

Create Read Update Delete