django-viewsets

A different way of constructing Django class-based views

Django's class based views provide many advantages over 'traditional' function based views. They simplify the handling of different HTTP methods and do much of the work in setting up and handling forms.

But the downside is that each class basically handles only one endpoint. You then have to stitch them together in the urls file. And the names of the endpoints there kind of look like the names of your classes. It almost seems like... repeating yourself.

Now, Django REST Framework has the concept of a ViewSet. Firstly they handle the different HTTP methods - handling POST is via a create method, for example. But they also allow extra views to be annotated as either a 'list' or a 'detail' view, so for instance you can have a /author/ list view of all authors, an /author/sales/ list view of the sales information for all authors, an /author/Shakespeare/ detail view of Shakespeare, and an /author/Shakespeare/books/ detail view for Shakespeare's publications. DRF's 'routers' can then introspect the ViewSet to find which URLs it publishes and maps them automatically.

django-viewsets provides the best of both worlds for Django users.

Goals:

Django-viewsets aims to provide:

• A single class for the views that handle all the URL endpoints in a path.
• Standard methods handle the index and detail views, as well as editing an object (in a mix-in, so you can add it if you want).
• Standard Django-compatible get_queryset and get_object methods for selecting data.
• Methods handle the incoming request and return a context.
• The class selects the template for each view based on its method name.
• It should be explicit which methods in a class are actually used to handle URLs within the path, using the @action decorator.

Example:

models.py

from django.db import models

class BlogPost(models.Model):
    slug = models.SlugField()
    title = models.CharField()
    text = models.TextField()

views.py

import time

from my_site.models import BlogPost

from viewsets import action, ViewSet, ModelViewSet

class HomePage(ViewSet):
    """
    A simple handler for the home page index.
    """
    template_dir = 'home'

    @action()
    def about(self, request):
        return {
            'currently': time.time()
        }

class BlogViewSet(ModelViewSet):
    lookup_field = 'slug'
    queryset = BlogPost.objects.all()
    template_dir = 'home/blog'

    # list, detail, create, destroy already included

    @action(detail=True)
    def stats(self, request, slug):
        post = self.get_object(slug=slug)
        # View methods return a context to be sent to the relevant template
        return {
            'mentions': post.mention_set.count()
        }

urls.py

from django.conf.urls import path, include
from views import HomePage, BlogViewSet

urlpatterns = [
    path(r'^', include(HomePage.get_urls())),
    path(r'^blog/', include(BlogViewSet.get_urls())),
]