Django Views - Class() based

As the name suggests, Django views can also be written in Class based style. The major advantage of using Class based views in Django is

• Code reusability and Clean Code

But, when creating a complex Class with lots of inheritance or mixins can make the situation hard to debug.

To create a Class() based view we subclass django.views.View

from django.views import View
class DashboardView(View):
    def get(self, request):
        # GET method 
        pass
    def post(self, request):
         # POST method
         pass

Converting examples from our function() based views to Class() based views

from django.views import View
from django.http impoty HttpResponse

class DashboardView(View):
    def get(self, request):
        # process view here
        return HttpResponse("Welcome to Dashboard")

#urls.py
urlpatterns = [
    path('dashboard/', DashboardView),
]
# this will not work

Since URL configurations expects callable function rather than class, we will use .as_view() class method of our View because as_view() returns a function to be used with URLs. This function does series of work for us,

1. calls setup() method to initialize the attributes
2. calls dispatch() method which determines if request if GET or POST and send this request to corresponding request method

So on our urls.py we do the following,

# urls.py
# import your view 

urlpatterns = [
    path('dashboard/', DashboardView.as_view()),
]

Capturing URL values in Class() based views

If you need to capture values from URL here at Class() based view, its similar to the function() based view, just add the new parameters(arguments) in your respective method.

#urls.py
urlpatterns = [
    path('profile/<str:username>/', ProfileView.as_view()),
]

from django.views import View
from django.http impoty HttpResponse

class ProfileView(View):
    def get(self, request, username):
        # process view here
        # get user info from DB using username
        return HttpResponse("My Profile")

Note: To make the development fast and easy, Django provides us with generic class based views as well majorly for performing C-R-U-D operations, which we will talk about in another tutorial See Django Docs for Generic class based views