(Picture: It is a good idea to keep your apps views module small. A common mistake is do much work inside the views functions. For the most part you can create separate modules to do the processing work outside the views and just import it and use the functions inside the views. Another common mistake is a single app implementing many different requirements or serving for many purposes. Sometimes you can split the work into different apps. When it makes sense of course. But sometimes, the views will get big anyway. In this case, you might want to split the views into different files.
Sample Scenario
Before I show you how, please consider the scenario below:
App dir
|∙∙core/
|∙∙__init__.py
|∙∙admin.py
|∙∙migrations/
|∙∙models.py
|∙∙tests.py
|∙∙urls.py
|∙∙views.pyviews.py
from django.shortcuts import render
def view_a(request):
return render(request, 'view_a.html')
def view_b(request):
return render(request, 'view_b.html')
def view_c(request):
return render(request, 'view_c.html')
def view_d(request):
return render(request, 'view_d.html')urls.py
from django.conf.urls import url
import .views
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^aaa$', views.view_a, name='view_a'),
url(r'^bbb$', views.view_b, name='view_b'),
url(r'^ccc$', views.view_c, name='view_c'),
url(r'^ddd$', views.view_d, name='view_d'),
]Splitting the Views
This strategy is good if you are refactoring your code base. This way you won’t need to change the way you handle
your urls.py. Even though the view functions are in different files, they are still acessible via views.view_a.
App dir
Remove the views.py file and create a directory named views. Add a __init__.py file inside it and create the separated view files.
|∙∙core/
|∙∙__init__.py
|∙∙admin.py
|∙∙migrations/
|∙∙models.py
|∙∙tests.py
|∙∙urls.py
|∙∙views/
|∙∙__init__.py
|∙∙alpha.py
|∙∙beta.pyviews/__init__.py
This is an important step: import all the modules inside each view file.
from .alpha import *
from .beta import *views/alpha.py
from django.shortcuts import render
def view_a(request):
return render(request, 'view_a.html')
def view_b(request):
return render(request, 'view_b.html')views/beta.py
from django.shortcuts import render
def view_c(request):
return render(request, 'view_c.html')
def view_d(request):
return render(request, 'view_d.html')urls.py
You don’t need to change anything here.
from django.conf.urls import url
import .views
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^aaa$', views.view_a, name='view_a'),
url(r'^bbb$', views.view_b, name='view_b'),
url(r'^ccc$', views.view_c, name='view_c'),
url(r'^ddd$', views.view_d, name='view_d'),
]Or you can simply import the views directly from different files. Truth is Django doesn’t really care about where the view function lives. And the name views is not mandatory, but it is recommended (always think about a new developer starting to work with your code – try to make things easier).
The example below you may keep views/__init__.py empty, since we are importing the views directly.
from django.conf.urls import url
from .views import alpha
from .views import beta
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^aaa$', alpha.view_a, name='view_a'),
url(r'^bbb$', alpha.view_b, name='view_b'),
url(r'^ccc$', beta.view_c, name='view_c'),
url(r'^ddd$', beta.view_d, name='view_d'),
]
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