Django - API and generic views

Posted under » Django on 7 May 2021

We have played a bit with the Django API. Lets use this for our Views at /polls/views.py.

Make the index() view, which displays the latest 5 poll questions in the system, separated by commas, according to publication date

from django.http import HttpResponse

from .models import Question

def index(request):
    latest_question_list = Question.objects.order_by('-pub_date')[:5]
    output = ', '.join([q.question_text for q in latest_question_list])
    return HttpResponse(output)

Using generic views. First, open the polls/urls.py URLconf and change it like so:

from django.urls import path
from . import views

app_name = 'polls'
urlpatterns = [
    path('', views.IndexView.as_view(), name='index'),
    path('<int:pk>/', views.DetailView.as_view(), name='detail'),
    path('<int:pk>/results/', views.ResultsView.as_view(), name='results'),
    path('<int:question_id>/vote/', views.vote, name='vote'),
]

Notice question_id has been replaced with pk and views are imported.

Now lets change the views and use Class.

from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect
from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404, render
from django.urls import reverse
from django.views import generic

from .models import Choice, Question

class IndexView(generic.ListView):
    template_name = 'polls/index.html'
        context_object_name = 'latest_question_list'

    def get_queryset(self):
            """Return the last five published questions."""
            return Question.objects.order_by('-pub_date')[:5]

    class DetailView(generic.DetailView):
        model = Question
    template_name = 'polls/detail.html'

    class ResultsView(generic.DetailView):
        model = Question
    template_name = 'polls/results.html'

We’re using two generic views here: ListView and DetailView. Respectively, those two views abstract the concepts of “display a list of objects” and “display a detail page for a particular type of object.”

Each generic view needs to know what model it will be acting upon. This is provided using the model attribute.

The DetailView generic view expects the primary key value captured from the URL to be called "pk", so we’ve changed question_id to pk for the generic views.

By default, the DetailView generic view uses a template called <app name>/<model name>_detail.html. In our case, it would use the template "polls/question_detail.html". The template_name attribute is used to tell Django to use a specific template name instead of the autogenerated default template name. We also specify the template_name for the results list view – this ensures that the results view and the detail view have a different appearance when rendered, even though they’re both a DetailView behind the scenes.

Similarly, the ListView generic view uses a default template called <app name>/<model name>_list.html; we use template_name to tell ListView to use our existing "polls/index.html" template.

In previous parts of the tutorial, the templates have been provided with a context that contains the question and latest_question_list context variables. For DetailView the question variable is provided automatically – since we’re using a Django model (Question), Django is able to determine an appropriate name for the context variable. However, for ListView, the automatically generated context variable is question_list. To override this we provide the context_object_name attribute, specifying that we want to use latest_question_list instead. As an alternative approach, you could change your templates to match the new default context variables – but it’s a lot easier to tell Django to use the variable you want.

Run the server, and use your new polling app based on generic views.