Class views in Django

Question

Django view points to a function, which can be a problem if you want to change only a bit of functionality. Yes, I could have million keyword arguments and even more if stat

Answer 1

I needed to use class based views, but I wanted to be able to use the full name of the class in my URLconf without always having to instantiate the view class before using it. What helped me was a surprisingly simple metaclass:

class CallableViewClass(type):
    def __call__(cls, *args, **kwargs):
        if args and isinstance(args[0], HttpRequest):
            instance = super(CallableViewClass, cls).__call__()
            return instance.__call__(*args, **kwargs)
        else:
            instance = super(CallableViewClass, cls).__call__(*args, **kwargs)
            return instance


class View(object):
    __metaclass__ = CallableViewClass

    def __call__(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        if hasattr(self, request.method):
            handler = getattr(self, request.method)
            if hasattr(handler, '__call__'):
                return handler(request, *args, **kwargs)
        return HttpResponseBadRequest('Method Not Allowed', status=405)

I can now both instantiate view classes and use the instances as view functions, OR I can simply point my URLconf to my class and have the metaclass instantiate (and call) the view class for me. This works by checking the first argument to __call__ – if it's a HttpRequest, it must be an actual HTTP request because it would be nonsense to attept to instantiate a view class with an HttpRequest instance.

class MyView(View):
    def __init__(self, arg=None):
        self.arg = arg
    def GET(request):
        return HttpResponse(self.arg or 'no args provided')

@login_required
class MyOtherView(View):
    def POST(request):
        pass

# And all the following work as expected.
urlpatterns = patterns(''
    url(r'^myview1$', 'myapp.views.MyView', name='myview1'),
    url(r'^myview2$', myapp.views.MyView, name='myview2'),
    url(r'^myview3$', myapp.views.MyView('foobar'), name='myview3'),
    url(r'^myotherview$', 'myapp.views.MyOtherView', name='otherview'),
)

(I posted a snippet for this at http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/2041/)