Mastering Django: Core

Performing extra work

The last common pattern we'll look at involves doing some extra work before or after calling the generic view. Imagine we had a last_accessed field on our Author model that we were using to keep track of the last time anybody looked at that author:

# models.py 
from django.db import models 
 
class Author(models.Model): 
    salutation = models.CharField(max_length=10) 
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200) 
    email = models.EmailField() 
    headshot = models.ImageField(upload_to='author_headshots') 
    last_accessed = models.DateTimeField() 

The generic DetailView class, of course, wouldn't know anything about this field, but once again we could easily write a custom view to keep that field updated. First, we'd need to add an author detail bit ...