Utilizing Generic Django Views

The use of generic Django views can aid in app development. As an example, let's write a view which displays a random animal and the sound it makes. First, create the view in views.py:

# views.py
from django.shortcuts import render

from nautobot.apps.views import GenericView

from .models import Animal


class RandomAnimalView(GenericView):
    """Display a randomly-selected Animal."""

    def get(self, request):
        animal = Animal.objects.order_by('?').first()
        return render(request, 'nautobot_animal_sounds/animal.html', {
            'animal': animal,
        })

Tip

The nautobot.apps.views.GenericView class was added in Nautobot 1.6.16 and 2.1.9. If you're developing against an earlier version, you can use django.views.generic.View in combination with the django.contrib.auth.mixins.LoginRequiredMixin instead.

This view retrieves a random animal from the database and and passes it as a context variable when rendering a template named animal.html, which doesn't exist yet. To create this template, first create a directory named templates/nautobot_animal_sounds/ within the app source directory. (We use the app's name as a subdirectory to guard against naming collisions with other apps.) Then, create a template named animal.html as described below.