Django: Getting Started Transcripts
Chapter: Course conclusion
Lecture: View functions
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A view is a function or class responsible for returning HTML and is typically mapped to a URL.
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Here, you see the book view which is implemented as a function. It takes two arguments, the request, and a book ID.
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All function views take at least one argument the request. The request contains information about the http request that resulted
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in the view being called. If your view takes other arguments, the URL mapping mechanism can be used to map parts of the URL
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to the argument in the function. As well as doing typecasting so that your numbers can be actual Python numbers instead of
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a string containing a number. There are a number of shortcut utility functions you can use to reduce the amount of code needed to write a view.
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The get object or 404 shortcut does a look up of a model object. It takes at least two arguments.
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The first is the name of the model being looked up and the second is any arguments in the filter that determines the object.
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If the query results in a single object it is returned. Otherwise, this shortcut raises a 404 exception telling the user they tried to do something
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they shouldn't have. Most views use templates to generate the HTML that is to be sent back to the browser. As this is such a common pattern
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the render shortcut takes the name of a template and some context data and renders a result,
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wrapping it in the needed http response object to be returned by the view.