Back
Feb 28, 2010

Composing multiple views in Django

In UNIX way, each view should solve single task. This is good idea, but sometimes we need to mix logic of different views on same page. Filter, sort, paginate, or, for example, add comment on product page. In this article I'll show how we can mix such multiple views.

Idea

We can write views as decorators.

Example

Simplified filtration can look like this:

from django.views.generic.list_detail import object_list


def filtered_list(request, filterset_class, queryset, *args, **kwargs):
    filterset = filterset_class(request.GET)
    queryset = filterset.filter(queryset)
    kwargs['extra_context']['filterset'] = filterset

    return object_list(request, queryset, *args, **kwargs)

This is simple and straightforward, but in order to add some tricky pagination, we have to copy entire view and add more code to it.

Instead, we can create decorator like this:

def filtered(view):
    def wrapped(request, filterset_class, queryset, *args, **kwargs):
        filterset = filterset_class(request.GET)
        queryset = filterset.filter(queryset)
        kwargs['extra_context']['filterset'] = filterset
        return view(request, queryset, *args, **kwargs)

    return wrapped

Result

Assuming, that we have similar decorators, sorted и paginated, we can easily combine them:

@filtered
@paginated
def technic_list(*args, **kwargs):
    # ...

Or even like this, in lisp style:

url(r'^technic/$', filtered(sorted(paginated(object_list))), {
    'filterset_class': FilterSet,
     # ...
}, name='technic_list'),

Subscribe for the news and updates

More thoughts
Sep 26, 2023TechnologyBusiness
13 Web Development Innovations to Adopt in the Next Year

Web development has undergone significant changes over the past five years due to a combination of technological advancements and changing user needs. Let's look at the drivers of these changes and the key technologies that have played a decisive role.

Mar 2, 2017Technology
API versioning with django rest framework?

We often handling API server updates including backwards-incompatible changes when upgrading web applications. At the same time we update the client part, therefore, we did not experience any particular difficulties.

Jan 28, 2017Technology
Creating a site preview like in slack (using aiohttp)

In this article we will write a small library for pulling metadata and creating a preview for a site just like Slack does.

Dec 1, 2016Technology
How to Use Django & PostgreSQL for Full Text Search

For any project there may be a need to use a database full-text search. We expect high speed and relevant results from this search. When we face such problem, we usually think about Solr, ElasticSearch, Sphinx, AWS CloudSearch, etc. But in this article we will talk about PostgreSQL. Starting from version 8.3, a full-text search support in PostgreSQL is available. Let's look at how it is implemented in the DBMS itself.

Nov 21, 2016Technology
Crawling FTP server with Scrapy

Welcome all who are reading this article. I was given a task of creating a parser (spider) with the Scrapy library and parsing FTP server with data. The parser had to find lists of files on the server and handle each file separately depending on the requirement to the parser.

Mar 4, 2011Technology
Css sprite generation

I've created this small sprite to create css sprites. It glues images from directory directory into single file and generates corresponding css.