When and how to use Django DetailView

When to use DetailView?

Django provides several class based generic views to accomplish common tasks. One among them is DetailView.

DetailView should be used when you want to present detail of a single model instance.

DetailView shouldn’t be used when your page has forms and does creation or update of objects. FormView, CreateView and UpdateView are more suitable for working with forms, creation or updation of objects.

Vanilla view can achieve everything which DetailView can, but DetailView has an advantage of avoiding a lot of boilerplate code which would be needed with View.

Let’s write a view by subclassing View and then modify the view to subclass DetailView. DetailView would help us avoid several lines of code and would also provide better separation of concern.

Vanilla View

Assume there is a model called Book in app books which looks like:

# books/models.py
class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    isbn = models.CharField(max_length=100)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title

You want to have a page which shows detail of a particular book. The url looks like:

# books/urls.py
from django.urls import path

from . import views

app_name = 'books'
urlpatterns = [
    path('<int:pk>/', views.BookDetailView.as_view(), name='detail'),
]

Vanilla view looks like:

# books/views.py
class BookDetailView(View):
    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        book = get_object_or_404(Book, pk=kwargs['pk'])
        context = {'book': book}
        return render(request, 'books/book_detail.html', context)

books/book_detail.html looks like the following:

<h3>Book detail</h3>
<p>{{book.title}}</p>
<p></p>

You should be seeing book detail at http://localhost:8000/books/1/.

By subclassing DetailView

Modify books/views.py code to look like:

class BookDetailView(DetailView):
      model = Book

Reload the page and you would still see book detail.

DetailView helped us avoid the following boilerplace code

• Avoid providing get() implementation
• Avoid creation of context
• Avoid passing context to the template
• Avoid returning HttpResponse() objects created by render().

Filter queryset before showing detail page

You might only detail pages for published Books to be accessible and unpublished books should give 404. This scenario assumes that there is a BooleanField called is_published on Book.

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    isbn = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    is_published = models.Booleanfield(default=True)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title

Create a book with is_published=False.

In [1]: from books.models import Book

In [2]: Book.objects.create(title='My Month Book', isbn='978-92-95055-02-6', is_published=False)
Out[2]: <Book: Book object (2)>

You can modify BookDetailView as such:

class BookDetailView(DetailView):
      queryset = Book.objects.filter(is_published=True)

If there is a Book with id=2 and is_published=False, then the detail url http://localhost:8000/books/2/ will give a 404, even though Book with id 2 exists in the db.

Notice that we removed the model attribute on the view and instead provided a queryset attribute.

Restrict users to only see books created by them

Let’s think of a hypothetical strange requirement. A user should only be allowed to view a book which has been written by them. This assumes that there is a user Foreign Key on Book.

In [3]: u = User.objects.latest('pk')

In [5]: Book.objects.create(title='My Month Book', isbn='978-92-95055-02-6', is_published=True, user=u)
Out[5]: <Book: Book object (3)>

Modify BookDetailView to the following:

class BookDetailView(DetailView):

	def get_queryset(self):
		if self.request.user.is_authenticated:
			return Book.objects.filter(is_published=True, user=self.request.user)
		else:
			return Book.objects.none()

A user would only be able to see a detail view if the book is published and if the user is the writer of this book.

Notice that we removed the queryset attribute on the view and instead provided a get_queryset() implementation.

Use slug as url parameter instead of pk

You might want to use isbn as the url parameter instead of pk. Eg: You might want detail view of book 1 to show up at /books/<isbn>/.

Let’s modify BookDetailView to look like:

class BookDetailView(DetailView):

    slug_field = 'isbn'
    slug_url_kwarg = 'isbn'

	def get_queryset(self):
		if self.request.user.is_authenticated:
			return Book.objects.filter(is_published=True, user=self.request.user)
		else:
			return Book.objects.none()

Assuming isbn of a Book is 978-92-95055-02-6 and the logged in user is the creator of Book, then the detail page would be accessible at http://localhost:8000/books/978-92-95055-02-6/.

Our other posts on generic class views

• TemplateView
• ListView
• FormView
• CreateView

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