Django Generic Views are simple, reusable views provided by Django that are designed to perform common web development tasks. Django is a high-level Python web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Built by experienced developers, it takes care of much of the hassle of web development, so developers can focus on writing their app without needing to reinvent the wheel (Django, 2021).
Generic Views in Django are a set of classes and mix-ins that Django provides to handle common web development tasks such as rendering a template, retrieving an object from the database based on a parameter, checking permissions, handling forms, etc. Django provides various Generic Views including ListView, DetailView, CreateView, UpdateView, DeleteView and more (Django, 2021).
For example, ListView is a generic view which lists out a queryset. ListView gets the queryset and provides it to the template context. If you have a model named ‘Book’ and you want to display its list, you can create a ListView (Django, 2021).
DetailView is another common generic view which is used to display a single object and its details. If you have a ‘Book’ model and you want to show the details of a book, you can use DetailView (Django, 2021).
As per Django documentation, generic views were developed as a shortcut for common usage patterns. They take certain common idioms and patterns found in view development and abstract them so that you can quickly write common views of data. With these, you can perform tasks like displaying a list of objects or a detail view of a single object with minimum code (Django, 2021).
This is an example of ListView (Django, 2021):
```
from django.views.generic import ListView
from myapp.models import Book
class BookListView(ListView):
model = Book
```
And this is an example of DetailView (Django, 2021):
```
from django.views.generic import DetailView
from myapp.models import Book
class BookDetailView(DetailView):
model = Book
```
In conclusion, Django Generic Views are not only a time saver but also help to make code cleaner and more readable by abstracting common patterns into a set of pre-written classes that you can use directly in your code. They make code reuse easy, increase consistency across views and reduce the overall amount of code you need to write.
Sources:
- Django. (2021). Django Generic Views. Retrieved from: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/topics/class-based-views/generic-display/
