Heads up! To view this whole video, sign in with your Courses account or enroll in your free 7-day trial. Sign In Enroll
Preview
Start a free Courses trial
to watch this video
Most people start writing Django views by using functions. This works great until you start creating multiple features that share a lot of similar view functionality. Function-based views are hard to reuse or make abstract. Django provides several classes for creating generic views, though!
Throughout the course, I'll be using two main sources of documentation, Django's official class-based views guide and the excellent, third-party site, CCBV.
Hi, I'm Kenneth, and
I'm a Python teacher here at Treehouse.
0:04
Thanks for joining me for
0:08
this course about a small but
very useful feature of Django.
0:08
Way back, long ago before I was a teacher,
I was a full-time Django developer.
0:12
One of the biggest projects I worked in,
at least in amount of code, was a CMS for
0:16
managing apartment websites.
0:20
While that product had many different
areas like amenities, community maps, and
0:22
unit tracking, each of those areas had
very similar functionality, creating and
0:25
deleting records, for example.
0:29
In regular old Python when you find
yourself doing the same work over and
0:31
over with just light changes you
put your code into logical classes
0:34
expose some configuration variables and
save yourself a lot of work.
0:38
But what if you find yourself
doing that in Django,
0:41
specifically were views are concerned.
0:44
Well you saw the title of this course, so
0:46
you probably guessed that
you make them into classes.
0:48
Django two types of class based views.
0:51
There's a class that's just named
view that you can use to build
0:54
class based views.
0:57
You can customize this class
to your heart's content and
0:58
make it do all sorts of amazing things.
1:00
There are also a set of views for common
use cases that are called generic views.
1:02
These generic views handle all of
the normal cred operations, creating,
1:06
reading, updating and deleting records.
1:10
They also handle things like
displaying and validating forms,
1:12
finding records by date, or
automatically performing HTTP redirects.
1:15
All of the generic views are built
on top of that basic view class too.
1:19
So back to my story
about the apartment CMS.
1:24
We switched over to using
class based views and
1:27
found that we could create new features
in just a fraction of the time.
1:29
Things became easier to test too,
1:32
because we could test only
the special parts of each app.
1:33
And review instead of having to check
lots of different factors each time.
1:36
Of course, this shift wasn't free,
there's a time and mental cost for
1:40
changing how you build something
as numerous as Django.
1:43
And Django's class based view inheritance
tree isn't the simplest tree ever.
1:46
Still though, I feel it's
a change well worth the cost and
1:50
I haven't built any Django project
without class based views in years.
1:53
Generic views get me 85% or more of the
way to what ever functionality I need and
1:56
then I can bring in reasonable
customizations to round out that last 15%.
2:01
In this course, I want to introduce you
to view and some of the more common and
2:06
useful views that are built on top of it.
2:09
I also want to show you how to
customize the views with small classes
2:11
in this mix-ins to tweak
how your views work so
2:13
you get exactly
the functionality you need.
2:16
Settle in, get your learning had on and
come one about Django class based with me.
2:18
You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to download course files.
Sign up