Django Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

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 HttpResponse("Hello {}!".format(name)) 

Our two-line view function is quite simple to understand. We are currently not doing anything with the request ...