Question

I looked through the Django built-in Auth app and noticed that views are split in many like:

password_reset,
password_reset_confirm,
password_reset_done,
password_reset_complete

Here every simple action has a distinct view. Should all the apps be written like that or is it fine for one view to manage more URLs?

Answer 1

The rule of thumb is that different URLs should be handled by different views.

Prior to the introduction of class-based views in Django 1.3, this could lead to a mess if your view function tried to handle many cases. But now you can create class-based views which allow you to subclass existing views and reuse behaviour of those views.

For example (for a site that has multiple games).

class GameView(View):

    def game_method(self):
        # compute things here            
        return data

class PuzzleGameView(GameView):

    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        data = self.game_method()
        # do other things here
        return HttpResponse("")

class SudokuGameView(PuzzleGameView):
    pass

class ActionGameView(GameView):
    pass

Methods defined in GameView can be called and reused in subclasses.