Question

I’m coming back to Django after a brief encounter with version 1.2, and now in version 1.3 the favored approach to views seems to be using classes.

Keeping in mind code style, maintainability and modularity: when should I use classes, and when functions? Should I always extend from generic class views (there seems to be no harm in using TemplateView), or should I use my own view callable objects?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There are in my opinion two cases for necessity of class-based(-generic)-views:

• You really need generic functionality in your views and a little bit extra.
• You write a resusable Django app and want to make it possible that others can extend your views.

For anything else use what you feel most comfortable with. As you said you basically good to go with extending from TemplateView and overwriting respective methods, though you could also use a function-based approach (and have to deal with render template calls by yourself). That’s up to you in the end.

EDIT: One other advantage of class based views is that it lets you separate your code according to the request.method in a more cleaner manner and even returns 405 Method Not Allowed response codes when the wrong method is used. So you don’t have to deal with lines like if request.method=='POST' or if request.method=='GET' at all and just extend a post or get method.