Django Design Patterns and Best Practices

Chapter 4. Views and URLs

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

• Class-based and function-based views
• Mixins
• Decorators
• Common view patterns
• Designing URLs

A view from the top

In Django, a view is defined as a callable that accepts a request and returns a response. It is usually a function or a class with a special class method such as as_view().

In both cases, we create a normal Python function that takes an HTTPRequest as the first argument and returns an HTTPResponse. A URLConf can also pass additional arguments to this function. These arguments can be captured from parts of the URL or set to default values.

Here is what a simple view looks like:

# In views.py from django.http import HttpResponse def hello_fn(request, name="World"): return ...