django-extra-views - The missing class-based generic views for Django

Django's class-based generic views are great, they let you accomplish a large number of web application design patterns in relatively few lines of code. They do have their limits though, and that's what this library of views aims to overcome.

Installation

Installing from pypi (using pip).

pip install django-extra-views

Installing from github.

pip install -e git://github.com/AndrewIngram/django-extra-views.git#egg=django-extra-views

Features so far

• FormSet and ModelFormSet views - The formset equivalents of FormView and ModelFormView.
• InlineFormSetView - Lets you edit formsets related to a model (uses inlineformset_factory)
• CreateWithInlinesView and UpdateWithInlinesView - Lets you edit a model and its relations
• GenericInlineFormSetView, the equivalent of InlineFormSetView but for GenericForeignKeys
• Support for generic inlines in CreateWithInlinesView and UpdateWithInlinesView
• Support for naming each inline or formset with NamedFormsetsMixin
• SortableListMixin - Generic mixin for sorting functionality in your views
• SearchableListMixin - Generic mixin for search functionality in your views

Still to do

I'd like to add support for pagination in ModelFormSetView and its derivatives, the goal being to be able to mimic the change_list view in Django's admin. Currently this is proving difficult because of how Django's MultipleObjectMixin handles pagination.

Examples

Defining a FormSetView.

from extra_views import FormSetView


class AddressFormSet(FormSetView):
    form_class = AddressForm
    template_name = 'address_formset.html'

Defining a ModelFormSetView.

from extra_views import ModelFormSetView


class ItemFormSetView(ModelFormSetView):
    model = Item
    template_name = 'item_formset.html'

Defining a CreateWithInlinesView and an UpdateWithInlinesView.

from extra_views import CreateWithInlinesView, UpdateWithInlinesView, InlineFormSet
from extra_views.generic import GenericInlineFormSet


class ItemInline(InlineFormSet):
    model = Item


class TagInline(GenericInlineFormSet):
    model = Tag


class CreateOrderView(CreateWithInlinesView):
    model = Order
    inlines = [ItemInline, TagInline]


class UpdateOrderView(UpdateWithInlinesView):
    model = Order
    inlines = [ItemInline, TagInline]


# Example URLs.
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^orders/new/$', CreateOrderView.as_view()),
    url(r'^orders/(?P<pk>\d+)/$', UpdateOrderView.as_view()),
)

Other bits of functionality

If you want more control over the names of your formsets (as opposed to iterating over inlines), you can use NamedFormsetsMixin.

from extra_views import NamedFormsetsMixin

class CreateOrderView(NamedFormsetsMixin, CreateWithInlinesView):
    model = Order
    inlines = [ItemInline, TagInline]
    inlines_names = ['Items', 'Tags']

You can add search functionality to your ListViews by adding SearchableMixin and by setting search_fields:

from django.views.generic import ListView
from extra_views import SearchableListMixin

class SearchableItemListView(SearchableListMixin, ListView):
    template_name = 'extra_views/item_list.html'
    search_fields = ['name', 'sku']
    model = Item

In this case object_list will be filtered if the 'q' query string is provided (like /searchable/?q=query), or you can manually override get_search_query method, to define your own search functionality.

Also you can define some items in search_fields as tuple (e.g. [('name', 'iexact', ), 'sku']) to provide custom lookups for searching. Default lookup is icontains. We strongly recommend to use only string lookups, when number fields will convert to strings before comparison to prevent converting errors. This controlled by check_lookups setting of SearchableMixin.

Define sorting in view.

from django.views.generic import ListView
from extra_views import SortableListMixin

class SortableItemListView(SortableListMixin, ListView):
    sort_fields_aliases = [('name', 'by_name'), ('id', 'by_id'), ]
    model = Item

You can hide real field names in query string by define sort_fields_aliases attribute (see example) or show they as is by define sort_fields. SortableListMixin adds sort_helper variable of SortHelper class, then in template you can use helper functions: {{ sort_helper.get_sort_query_by_FOO }}, {{ sort_helper.get_sort_query_by_FOO_asc }}, {{ sort_helper.get_sort_query_by_FOO_desc }} and {{ sort_helper.is_sorted_by_FOO }}

More descriptive examples to come.