Question

I finished reading the documentation for the reverse() method of the Django URL dispatcher.

When is it useful?

Thank you!

Answer 1

The function supports the dry principle – ensuring that you don’t hard code urls throughout your app. A url should be defined in one place, and only one place – your url conf. After that you’re really just referencing that info.

Use reverse() to give you the url of a page, given either the path to the view, or the page_name parameter from your url conf. You would use it in cases where it doesn’t make sense to do it in the template with {% url 'my-page' %}.

There are lots of possible places you might use this functionality. One place I’ve found I use it is when redirecting users in a view (often after the successful processing of a form)-

return HttpResponseRedirect(reverse('thanks-we-got-your-form-page'))

You might also use it when writing template tags.

Another time I used reverse() was with model inheritance. I had a ListView on a parent model, but wanted to get from any one of those parent objects to the DetailView of it’s associated child object. I attached a get__child_url() function to the parent which identified the existence of a child and returned the url of it’s DetailView using reverse().