Question

I’m new at this whole Django thing and as such, I’ve decided to start off with the ClassBased GenericViews rather than the older function based Generics, which has caused a couple stumbling blocks do to lack of documentation. Anyway, so far I really like the GenericViews and have been extending them with decorators.

Simple example of what I’ve been doing

ideapad/urls.py

from ideapad.views import *

urlpatterns = patterns('ideapad.views',
        url(r'^$', IndexListView.as_view(), name='url_index'),
        )

ideapad/views.py

from django.views.generic import ListView
from ideapad.models import Idea
from sauce.decorators import sort_queryset

@sort_queryset('-date')
class IndexListView(ListView):
    model = Idea
    template_name = 'ideapad/index.html'
    context_object_name = 'ideas'

sauce/decorators.py

def sort_queryset(default_sort):
    """
    Decorator that sorts queryset according to GET data
    Made to wrap GenericViews with get_queryset methods
    """
    def decorator(cls):
        fn=cls.get_queryset
        def wrapper(self):
            queryset = fn(self)
            sortmethod = self.request.GET.get('sort', default_sort)
            if hasattr(queryset, 'order_by'):
                queryset = queryset.order_by(sortmethod)
            return queryset
        cls.get_queryset=wrapper
        return cls
    return decorator

My question is, as a matter of overall readability and maintainability, is there a ‘better’ or ‘more acceptable’ way of doing this? Or is it just a coding style preference?

Reason I ask is, while I think it’s more readable this way, I’d like to make money doing this some day and don’t want to develop strange coding habits that are going to piss off co-workers so pretty much any input on coding style is much appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

This is proper way to do this (I have edited your code):

ideapad/views.py

from django.views.generic import ListView
from ideapad.models import Idea
from sauce.decorators import SortQuerysetMixin

class IndexListView(SortQuerysetMixin, ListView):
    default_sort = '-date'
    model = Idea
    template_name = 'ideapad/index.html'
    context_object_name = 'ideas'

sauce/decorators.py

class SortQuerysetMixin(object):
    def get_queryset(self):
        queryset = super(SortQuerysetMixin, self).get_queryset()
        sortmethod = self.request.GET.get('sort', self.default_sort)
        if hasattr(queryset, 'order_by'):
            queryset = queryset.order_by(sortmethod)
        return queryset