Pluggable Views

New in version 0.7.

Flask 0.7 introduces pluggable views inspired by the generic views from Django which are based on classes instead of functions. The main intention is that you can replace parts of the implementations and this way have customizable pluggable views.

Basic Principle

Consider you have a function that loads a list of objects from the database and renders into a template:

@app.route('/users/')
def show_users(page):
    users = User.query.all()
    return render_template('users.html', users=users)

This is simple and flexible, but if you want to provide this view in a generic fashion that can be adapted to other models and templates as well you might want more flexibility. This is where pluggable class based views come into place. As the first step to convert this into a class based view you would do this:

from flask.views import View

class ShowUsers(View):

    def dispatch_request(self):
        users = User.query.all()
        return render_template('users.html', objects=users)

app.add_url_rule('/users/', ShowUsers.as_view('show_users'))

As you can see what you have to do is to create a subclass of flask.views.View and implement dispatch_request(). Then we have to convert that class into an actual view function by using the as_view() class method. The string you pass to that function is the name of the endpoint that view will then have. But this by itself is not helpful, so let’s refactor the code a bit:

from flask.views import View

class ListView(View):

    def get_template_name(self):
        raise NotImplementedError()

    def render_template(self, context):
        return render_template(self.get_template_name(), **context)

    def dispatch_request(self):
        context = {'objects': self.get_objects()}
        return self.render_template(context)

class UserView(ListView):

    def get_template_name(self):
        return 'users.html'

    def get_objects(self):
        return User.query.all()

This of course is not that helpful for such a small example, but it’s good enough to explain the basic principle. When you have a class based view the question comes up what self points to. The way this works is that whenever the request is dispatched a new instance of the class is created and the dispatch_request() method is called with the parameters from the URL rule. The class itself is instanciated with the parameters passed to the as_view() function. For instance you can write a class like this:

class RenderTemplateView(View):
    def __init__(self, template_name):
        self.template_name = template_name
    def dispatch_request(self):
        return render_template(self.template_name)

And then you can register it like this:

app.add_url_rule('/about', view_func=RenderTemplateView.as_view(
    'about_page', template_name='about.html'))

Method Hints

Pluggable views are attached to the application like a regular function by either using route() or better add_url_rule(). That however also means that you would have to provide the names of the HTTP methods the view supports when you attach this. In order to move that information to the class you can provide a methods attribute that has this information:

class MyView(View):
    methods = ['GET', 'POST']

    def dispatch_request(self):
        if request.method == 'POST':
            ...
        ...

app.add_url_rule('/myview', view_func=MyView.as_view('myview'))

Method Based Dispatching

For RESTful APIs it’s especially helpful to execute a different function for each HTTP method. With the flask.views.MethodView you can easily do that. Each HTTP method maps to a function with the same name (just in lowercase):

from flask.views import MethodView

class UserAPI(MethodView):

    def get(self):
        users = User.query.all()
        ...

    def post(self):
        user = User.from_form_data(request.form)
        ...

app.add_url_rule('/users/', view_func=UserAPI.as_view('users'))

That way you also don’t have to provide the methods attribute. It’s automatically set based on the methods defined in the class.