Detail View – Class Based Views Django

Detail View refers to a view (logic) to display one instances of a table in the database.Class based views are simpler and efficient to manage than function-based views. A function based view with tons of lines of code can be converted into a class based views with few lines only.

After you have a project and an app, let’s create a model of which we will be creating instances through our view.

from django.db import models

# Create your models here.

class Article(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    body = models.TextField(blank=True, default="")
    slug = models.SlugField(max_length=200)
    published = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)

    class Meta:
        ordering = ('-published',)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.title

Class Based Views automatically setup everything from A to Z. One just needs to specify which model to create DetailView for, then Class based DetailView will automatically try to find a template in app_name/modelname_detail.html or you can use template_name.

class ArticleDetail(DetailView):
	model = Article

        #if template_name is specified, then it will look like the below mentioned code.
        # template_name = 'blogpost/article_detail.html'

Now create a url path to map the view.

       path('slug>', views.ArticleDetail.as_view(), name='articledetail'),

slug should be in between angular brackets.

Manipulate Context Data in DetailView

By default DetailView will only display fields of a table. If one wants to modify this context data before sending it to template or add some extra field, context data can be overridden.

class ArticleDetail(DetailView):
	model = Article

        def get_context_data(self, *args, **kwargs):
		context = super().get_context_data(*args, **kwargs)
		# add extra field 
		context["latest"] = Article.objects.all()   
		return context

Now the template will change to

{{ object.title }} 
{{ object.body }} 

{% for latest_blog in latest %}
        a href="{% url 'articledetail' latest_blog.slug %}">{{latest_blog.title|safe}}
{% endfor %}