Daniel Roy Greenfeld

Daniel Roy Greenfeld

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Django Update View Without Slug in the URL

Today I wanted to use the Django Class Based View (CBV) UpdateView but without a slug identifier in the URL. For example, instead of /profiles/pydanny/ I would go to /my-crazy-profile/. Also, I needed to force authentication.

I've done this with Django functional views a few times times, but today I did it in Django. This is what I did:

1. Added django-braces to my project

Kenneth Love and Chris Jones' awesome django-braces package has some very handy mixins for working with Django CBVs. Kenneth and Chris really understand CBVs, specifically on how to extend them, and have provided a bunch of really useful utility methods in the django-braces library. Yeah, I could figure this stuff out on my own, but since those guys already did the hard work I might as well just lean on them.

pip install django-braces==0.1.3
# settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = (
...
'braces',
...
)

2. Wrote the view

Assuming a very simple profile Model and Form (which they weren't - but that's not what this post is about), this is how I implemented the view:

# profiles/views.py
from django.views.generic import UpdateView

from braces.views import LoginRequiredMixin  # handles authentication

from profiles.forms import ProfileForm
from profiles.models import Profile

class ProfileUpdateView(LoginRequiredMixin, UpdateView):

    form_class = ProfileForm
    success_url = "/my-crazy-profile/"  # You should be using reverse here

    def get_object(self):
        return Profile.objects.get(user=self.request.user)

3. Wrote the URLconf

The URL pretty much wrote itself:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import patterns, url

from profiles import views

urlpatterns = patterns("",
    url(regex=r'^my-crazy-profile/$',
        view=views.ProfileUpdateView.as_view(),
        name='profile_update'),
)

Closing Thoughts

For a while, I've used django-braces for anything that involves CBVs. I can't imagine working on projects using CBVs without them. In fact, some of the mixins such as LoginRequiredMixin are things that I could argue ought to be in core Django.

This pattern really nails the sweet spot of Django CBVs. Thanks to the use of mixins and model forms, I get an amazing amount of stuff done in a 5 line CBV.


Tags: python django howto class-based-views
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