Question

I’ve switched to Django 1.3 in order to get pagination for my date based generic views. This works fine, however there is a page where I want a specific number of items but do not want it paginated. For example, return the first 5 news entries.

In 1.2 we had num_latest which we could put in our info dict to get the latest items. This doesn’t seem to exist with the new class-based generic views.

I could set paginate_by to 5 and just not use the pagination links in the template, but then people will still be able to see the old entries by punching in the url manually (which I don’t want). Furthermore I don’t want Django to set up pagination that I’m not going to use.

Edit: This is the urlconf line I’m currently using:

url(r'^$', 
    ArchiveIndexView.as_view(
        model = Entry,
        context_object_name = 'entry_list',
        template_name = 'news/news.html',
        date_field = 'published',
    ), name = 'archive_index'
),

Further edit: Attempting to override get_dated_queryset I’ve used this bit of code in conjunction with the urlconf as above but with the new view called:

class MainIndex(ArchiveIndexView):
    def get_dated_queryset(self):
        return Entry.objects.all()[:2]

I get almost the same error as mentioned in the comments:
Cannot reorder a query once a slice has been taken.

Answer 1

Try overriding this instead:

def get_dated_items(self):
    date_list, items, extra_context = super(MainIndex, self).get_dated_items()
    return (date_list, items[:2], extra_context)

Note: this implementation may leave the date_list inconsistent with the items query set after the latter is sliced. I think that to fix that you would need to regenerate date_list too. see the implementation of BaseArchiveIndexView.get_dated_items in SVN for more details: http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/views/generic/dates.py.
Something like this might work:

def get_dated_items(self):
    date_list, items, extra_context = super(MainIndex, self).get_dated_items()
    items = items[:2]
    date_list = self.get_date_list(items, 'year')
    if not date_list:
        items = items.none()
    return (date_list, items, extra_context)

but if it works without this, I would not touch it because it looks too messy.