Introduction

Class-based generic views?

So what are class-based generic views? A generic view is one which provides generic functionality. Implementing these types of views with classes allows the developer to customise this behaviour.

A simple example:

from pyramid_views import views
# An example TemplateView which simply renders the home template
class HomeView(views.TemplateView):
    template_name = 'templates/home.pt'

And to add a route:

config.add_route('home', '/', HomeView.as_view())

Why?

The motivation here is to allow for flexible views while removing the need for boiler-plate code.

Differences from Django

The functionality here is a direct port of Django’s class-based views, so those docs are the recommended reference point.

However, there are a few differences to note:

  • Any reference to the term queryset has changed to query. For example:

    • get_queryset() is now get_query()
    • The queryset attribute is now the query attribute

  • The __all__ value for the fields attribute is unsupported. Omit the fields attribute entirely for the same behaviour.

Additional functionality includes:

  • The MacroMixin class, for passing macros to chameleon templates via the macro_names attribute.
  • The DbSessionMixin class makes the database session available via self.db_session
  • The UpdateView class supports the partial_updates option. When True, this will only update fields present in the request
  • Form-based can take the endpoint parameter. When True, the view will behave like an API endpoint rather than a user-facing page (errors encoded as JSON, 200 response codes when success_uri not present).