Django Class Based Views Inspector

Use the Django Class Based Views Inspector

What's a class based view anyway?

Django 1.3 came with class based generic views. These are really awesome, and very powerfully coded with mixins and base classes all over the shop. This means they're much more than just a couple of generic shortcuts, they also provide utilities which can be mixed in the much more complex views that you write yourself.

Great! So what's the point of the inspector?

All of this power comes at the expense of simplicity. Trying to work out exactly which method you need to customise on your UpdateView can feel a little like wading through spaghetti - it has 8 separate ancestors (plus object) spread across 3 different files. So working out that you wanted to tweak UpdateView.get_initial and what it's keyword arguments are is a bit of a faff.

That's where this comes in! Here's the manifesto:

Provide an easy interface to learning the awesomeness of class based views. It should offer at least the ability to view the MRO of a generic view, all of the methods which are available on a particular class (including all inherited methods) complete with signature and docstrings. Ideally you should then be able to see where that method has come from, and any super calls it's making should be identified. Wrap this all up in a shiny front end!

Tools to consider

• Python's built in inspect module to work out what's going on and put it in the database
• JQuery for shinyness
• Backbone for JS structure
• Piston for API
• SASS/LESS and/or Bootstrap to make CSS less painful

Installation

Install as you normally would a django site (requirements.txt provided).

e.g. (inside your virtualenv or whatever)

pip install -r requirements.txt