Django Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

Decorators

Before class-based views, decorators were the only way to change the behavior of function-based views. Being wrappers around a function, they cannot change the inner working of the view, and thus effectively treat them as black boxes.

A decorator is a function that takes a function and returns the decorated function. Confused? There is some syntactic sugar to help you. Use the annotation notation @, as shown in the following login_required decorator example:

@login_required 
def simple_view(request): 
    return HttpResponse() 

The following code is exactly the same as the preceding:

def simple_view(request): 
    return HttpResponse() 
 
simple_view = login_required(simple_view) 

Since login_required wraps around the view, a wrapper function ...