A view is a callable which takes a request and returns a response. This can be more than just a function, and Django provides an example of some classes which can be used as views. These allow you to structure your views and reuse code by harnessing inheritance and mixins. There are also some generic views for tasks which we’ll get to later, but you may want to design your own structure of reusable views which suits your use case. For full details, see the class-based views reference documentation.

Django provides base view classes which will suit a wide range of applications. All views inherit from the View class, which handles linking the view into the URLs, HTTP method dispatching and other common features. RedirectView provides a HTTP redirect, and TemplateView extends the base class to make it also render a template.

Any arguments passed to as_view() will override attributes set on the class. In this example, we set template_name on the TemplateView . A similar overriding pattern can be used for the url attribute on RedirectView .

The most direct way to use generic views is to create them directly in your URLconf. If you’re only changing a few attributes on a class-based view, you can pass them into the as_view() method call itself:

Subclassing generic views¶

The second, more powerful way to use generic views is to inherit from an existing view and override attributes (such as the template_name ) or methods (such as get_context_data ) in your subclass to provide new values or methods. Consider, for example, a view that just displays one template, about.html . Django has a generic view to do this - TemplateView - so we can subclass it, and override the template name:

# some_app/views.py from django.views.generic import TemplateView class AboutView ( TemplateView ): template_name = "about.html"

Then we need to add this new view into our URLconf. TemplateView is a class, not a function, so we point the URL to the as_view() class method instead, which provides a function-like entry to class-based views:

# urls.py from django.urls import path from some_app.views import AboutView urlpatterns = [ path ( 'about/' , AboutView . as_view ()), ]

For more information on how to use the built in generic views, consult the next topic on generic class-based views.