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Generic Views

  • ObjectView - Retrieve a single object for display.
  • ObjectListView - List a series of objects.
  • ObjectEditView - Create or edit a single object.
  • ObjectDeleteView - Delete a single object.
  • BulkCreateView - Create new objects in bulk.
  • BulkDeleteView - Delete objects in bulk.
  • BulkEditView - Edit objects in bulk.
  • BulkImportView - Import objects in bulk from CSV.

Once you define a view by subclassing any of the above generic classes, you must register it in your urls.py as usual. There are a few things to be aware of here:

  • Reverse URL naming needs to follow a template of {modelname}_{method} where the model name is lowercased model class name from models.py and method is the purpose of the view. E.g. _list, _add, _edit.
  • The default rendering context for the ObjectListView includes some standard action_buttons for interacting with the listed model. By default this view defines action_buttons = ("add", "import", "export"). The export action is handled automatically by ObjectListView, but the add and import actions need corresponding views in order to work. In other words, if you implement an ObjectListView and do not override its action_buttons, you must also implement and register the corresponding ObjectEditView and BulkImportView subclasses as well.

Warning

If you're missing any of the aforementioned URLs/Views, when accessing your list view it will result in a error Reverse for 'None' not found. 'None' is not a valid view function or pattern name.

If you do not need ObjectEditView and/or BulkImportView for your particular model, as an alternative you can simply update your ObjectListView subclass to overload the action buttons. For example, action_buttons = ("add",) or if none are required action_buttons = ().

To demonstrate these concepts we can look at the example_plugin included in the Nautobot repository.

The example plugin has a simple model called ExampleModel:

class ExampleModel(OrganizationalModel):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=20, help_text="The name of this Example.")
    number = models.IntegerField(default=100, help_text="The number of this Example.")

    csv_headers = ["name", "number"]

    class Meta:
        ordering = ["name"]

The list view for this model subclasses generic.ObjectListView and does not overload the action_buttons:

class ExampleModelListView(generic.ObjectListView):
    """List `ExampleModel` objects."""

    queryset = ExampleModel.objects.all()
    filterset = filters.ExampleModelFilterSet
    filterset_form = forms.ExampleModelFilterForm
    table = tables.ExampleModelTable

Info

Since action_buttons was not overloaded, action_buttons = ("add", "import", "export") is inherited.

In order for this to work properly we expect to see urls.py have each of the required URLs/Views implemented with the template mentioned above.

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    path("models/", views.ExampleModelListView.as_view(),name="examplemodel_list"),
    path("models/add/", views.ExampleModelEditView.as_view(), name="examplemodel_add"),
    ...
    path(
        "models/import/",
        views.ExampleModelBulkImportView.as_view(),
        name="examplemodel_import",
    ),
    ...
]