django-viewsets 0.1

Problematic

When having a look at Ruby on Rails, I discovered a nice feature that was missing in Django: controllers. Contrary to what I often read, views in Django are not really equivalent to controllers in Rails. A Rails controller basically is a set of Django views and Django URL patterns. Apart from driving off boring URL work, this is a clean way to group views that belongs to the same model.

Any good djangonaut would make the connection with generic views − especially class-based. This is the easiest solution to avoid repeating the same code with a few changes. But this is not simplifying URL patterns and we often have to define such files:

# views.py
from django.views.generic import ListView, DetailView  # and so on…
from .models import Example


class ExampleListView(ListView):
    model = Example


class ExampleDetailView(DetailView):
    model = Example

# and so on…

# urls.py
from django.conf.urls import patterns, url
from .views import *


urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url('^examples/$', ExampleListView.as_view(), name='example_index'),
    url('^examples/(?P<pk>\d+)$', ExampleDetailView.as_view(),
        name='example_detail'),
    # and so on…
)

With a single model, this looks easy. With complex applications containing dozens of models, this looks painful − and definitely not DRY.

Solution

django-viewsets proposes a solution inspired of Rails controllers. ViewSet is a class that builds a set of URL patterns from a set of class-based generic views. It is designed to be overridable, so that it fits standard as well as advanced use.

Installation

[sudo] pip install django-viewsets

You don’t have to change your project settings.py.

Usage

ModelViewSet

In your application views.py:

from viewsets import ModelViewSet
from .models import YourModel

class YourModelViewSet(ModelViewSet):
    model = YourModel

In your application urls.py:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, url, include
from .views import YourModelViewSet

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url('', include(YourModelViewSet().urls)),
)

That’s it! ModelViewSet provides you these views and urls − based on the model verbose_name_plural:

To override your-models in all URLs, set the attribute base_url.

To remove some views from the viewset, set the attribute excluded_views to a sequence of keys of the views dict. For example: ('create_view', 'delete_view',).