Conditional PDF rendering based on query parameters

[richin13]

Hello there 👋,

I want to propose a new feature.

Use case

I have a view that recently 'got converted' to PDFTemplateView but that view only works for a few scenarios. There is still and scenario where I need the view to be a plain HTML response. Being able to configure PDFTemplateView to render the view as a PDF file based on some configured query parameter comes in handy to achieve such behavior.

Say for example I have a view at the endpoint /invoices/123. The idea is that if I fetch /invoices/123 it returns a plain HTML response. But if I fetch /invoices/123?pdf or /invoices/123?format=pdf the PDFTemplateView will do its job.

Of course this would break the existing behavior but we can make it work without the need to make a major version bump.

Implementation

Taking into consideration backwards compatibility as the most important aspect I was thinking that we should add an extra view property (and its corresponding get method)

...


class MyAwesomeView(DetailView, PDFTemplateResponseMixin):
    model = ....
    trigger = 'pdf' # Naming it's not my strength

    # or
    def get_trigger(self): # Again, naming...
        return 'pdf'

This way, existing implementations that do not include a trigger option will behave exactly the same as a None value for trigger would normally render the view as a PDF file.

PR

I already went ahead and forked the repo to start working on this. Any comment or thought will be appreciated. And If anyone can come with a better naming for the class' property I will highly grateful 😅