Django Blog #18: Using class-based views

Class-based representations are an alternative way to implement representations as objects rather than Python functions. Since a view is a callable object that accepts a web request and returns a response, it can be defined as class methods. Django provides basic view classes for this. They all inherit the View class, which handles the HTTP direction method and other functions. Class-based views offer advantages over function-based views in certain cases. They have the following features:

• Code associated with HTTP methods such as GET, POST or PUT in separate methods rather than condition branches.
• Using inheritance to create view classes that can be used repeatedly (known as mixins).

Read more about class-based representations here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/topics/class-based-views/intro/. Let’s change the post_list view to “class-based” to use the generic ListView from Django. This basic view allows you to display objects of any kind. Edit the views.py file of the blog application and add the following code.

from django.views.generic import ListView

class PostListView(ListView) 
queryset = Post.published.all()
    context_object_name = 'posts' 
    paginate_by = 3 
    template_name = ' blog/post/list.html'

This class view is similar to the previously used post_list. The code above tells ListView that it should:

• Use a specific QuerySet instead of getting all objects. Instead of defining a queryset attribute, you can use a specific model = Post, and Django will build a generic QuerySet Post.objects.all() automatically.
• Use the context variable posts to query results. If context_object_name is not defined, the default variable is object_list.
• Split the result into pages with three objects per page.
• Use a custom template for rendering. If no default template is specified, ListView uses blog/post_list.html.

Now open the blog application’s urls.py file, comment out the previous post_list URL pattern and add a new one using the PostListView class:

urlpatterns = [ 
   # post views 
   # path('', views.post_list, name='post_list'), path('', views.PostListView.as_view(), name='post_list'),  
    path('<int:year>/<int:month>/<int:day>/<slug:post>/',  
	 views.post_detail,  
	 name='post_detail'),  
]

For pagination to work, you need to use the correct page object that is passed to the template. The general Django ListView view passes the selected page to the page_obj variable, so you need to edit the post/list.html template. This is necessary for the paginator to use the correct variable:

{% include "pagination.html" with page=page_obj %}

Open https://127.0.0.1:8000/blog/ in your browser and check that everything works the same way as with the previous post_list view. This is a simple example of a class-based view using a generic Django class.

Bottom line

You’ve learned the basics of the Django web framework and created a basic blog application. Developed data models and applied migrations. Created views, templates, and URLs for the project, including pagination. Next we’ll talk about improving the application with a comment system and tagging feature, as well as allowing users to share posts via email.