django-baseviews 0.2

Basic Views

The simplest views can be handled by creating a subclass of BasicView, defining the template attribute, and implementing the get_context method.

from baseviews import BaseView
from lol.models import Cheezburger

class LolHome(BasicView):
    template = 'lol/home.html'

    def get_context(self):
        return {'burgers': Cheezburger.objects.i_can_has()}

Caching the Context

If you’d like to cache the context through the low-level cache API, add the cache_key and cache_time attributes and override the cached_context method instead of the get_context method. Additionally, you can override uncached_context to add context that shouldn’t be cached. If cache_time isn’t set, it defaults to the arbitrary length of 5 minutes.

class LolHome(BasicView):
    template = 'lol/home.html'
    cache_key = 'lol_home'
    cache_time = 60*20 # 20 minutes

    def cached_context(self):
        return {'burgers': Cheezburger.objects.i_can_has()}

The cache_key attribute can include string formatting, which you can populate by overriding the get_cache_key method:

class LolDetail(BasicView):
    template = 'lol/detail.html'
    cache_key = 'lol_detail:%s'
    cache_time = 60*20 # 20 minutes

    def __call__(self, request, lol_slug):
        self.lol = Lol.objects.get(slug=lol_slug)
        return super(LolDetail, self).__call__(self, request)

    def get_cache_key(self):
        return self.cache_key % self.lol.slug

Ajax Views

The AjaxView class is a subclass of BasicView that takes the context and uses simplejson to dump it to a JSON object. If the view is not requested via Ajax, it raises an Http404 exception.

Decorators

Built-in decorators such as login_required don’t work by default with class-based views. This is because the first argument passed to the decorator is the class instance, not the request object. Todd Reed posted an excellent solution to this problem on his blog.

I’ve added his solution to baseviews as decorate. To decorate a class-view method, use decorate like this:

from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
from baseviews import decorate, BasicView

class BucketFinder(BasicView):
    template = 'lol/wheres_mah_bucket.html'

    @decorate(login_required)
    def __call__(self, request):
        return super(BucketFinder, self).__call__(request)

Form Views

Form processing can be simplified with a subclass of the FormView class. Define an extra attribute called form_class and set it to the form you’d like to use. The most basic processing can be handled without any further effort. FormView will get the form and add it to the context, and if the request method is POST it will attempt to validate and save it.

If you would like to do more, you can extend the get_form and process_form methods:

def get_form(self):
    self.form_options = {'request': self.request, 'kitteh': self.kitteh}
    return super(KittehView, self).get_form()

def process_form(self):
    if self.request.POST.get('edit', False):
        if self.form.is_valid():
            self.form.save()
            return redirect('kitteh_edited',
                            slug=self.kitteh.slug)
    elif self.request.POST.get('delete', False):
        self.kitteh.delete()
        return redirect('kitteh_deleted')