Generic display views

The two following generic class-based views are designed to display data. On many projects they are typically the most commonly used views.

DetailView

class django.views.generic.detail.DetailView

While this view is executing, self.object will contain the object that the view is operating upon.

Ancestors (MRO)

This view inherits methods and attributes from the following views:

Method Flowchart

  1. setup()
  2. dispatch()
  3. http_method_not_allowed()
  4. get_template_names()
  5. get_slug_field()
  6. get_queryset()
  7. get_object()
  8. get_context_object_name()
  9. get_context_data()
  10. get()
  11. render_to_response()

Example myapp/views.py:

from django.utils import timezone
from django.views.generic.detail import DetailView

from articles.models import Article

class ArticleDetailView(DetailView):

    model = Article

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        context = super().get_context_data(**kwargs)
        context['now'] = timezone.now()
        return context

Example myapp/urls.py:

from django.urls import path

from article.views import ArticleDetailView

urlpatterns = [
    path('<slug:slug>/', ArticleDetailView.as_view(), name='article-detail'),
]

Example myapp/article_detail.html:

<h1>{{ object.headline }}</h1>
<p>{{ object.content }}</p>
<p>Reporter: {{ object.reporter }}</p>
<p>Published: {{ object.pub_date|date }}</p>
<p>Date: {{ now|date }}</p>

ListView

class django.views.generic.list.ListView

A page representing a list of objects.

While this view is executing, self.object_list will contain the list of objects (usually, but not necessarily a queryset) that the view is operating upon.

Ancestors (MRO)

This view inherits methods and attributes from the following views:

Method Flowchart

  1. setup()
  2. dispatch()
  3. http_method_not_allowed()
  4. get_template_names()
  5. get_queryset()
  6. get_context_object_name()
  7. get_context_data()
  8. get()
  9. render_to_response()

Example views.py:

from django.utils import timezone
from django.views.generic.list import ListView

from articles.models import Article

class ArticleListView(ListView):

    model = Article
    paginate_by = 100  # if pagination is desired

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        context = super().get_context_data(**kwargs)
        context['now'] = timezone.now()
        return context

Example myapp/urls.py:

from django.urls import path

from article.views import ArticleListView

urlpatterns = [
    path('', ArticleListView.as_view(), name='article-list'),
]

Example myapp/article_list.html:

<h1>Articles</h1>
<ul>
{% for article in object_list %}
    <li>{{ article.pub_date|date }} - {{ article.headline }}</li>
{% empty %}
    <li>No articles yet.</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

If you’re using pagination, you can adapt the example template from the pagination docs. Change instances of contacts in that example template to page_obj.

class django.views.generic.list.BaseListView

A base view for displaying a list of objects. It is not intended to be used directly, but rather as a parent class of the django.views.generic.list.ListView or other views representing lists of objects.

Ancestors (MRO)

This view inherits methods and attributes from the following views:

Methods

get(request, *args, **kwargs)

Adds object_list to the context. If allow_empty is True then display an empty list. If allow_empty is False then raise a 404 error.

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