> Django’s generic views... were developed as a shortcut for common usage patterns... They take certain common idioms and patterns found in view development and abstract them so that you can quickly write common views of data without having to repeat yourself.
One of the key benefits of class based views is the way they allow you to compose bits of reusable behaviour. REST framework takes advantage of this by providing a number of pre-built views that provide for commonly used patterns.
If the generic views don't suit the needs of your API, you can drop down to using the regular `APIView` class, or reuse the mixins and base classes used by the generic views to compose your own set of reusable generic views.
## Examples
Typically when using the generic views, you'll override the view, and set several class attributes.
For very simple cases you might want to pass through any class attributes using the `.as_view()` method. For example, your URLconf might include something the following entry.
The following classes are the concrete generic views. If you're using generic views this is normally the level you'll be working at unless you need heavily customized behavior.
*`model` - The model that should be used for this view. Used as a fallback for determining the serializer if `serializer_class` is not set, and as a fallback for determining the queryset if `queryset` is not set. Otherwise not required.
*`serializer_class` - The serializer class that should be used for validating and deserializing input, and for serializing output. If unset, this defaults to creating a serializer class using `self.model`, with the `DEFAULT_MODEL_SERIALIZER_CLASS` setting as the base serializer class.
*`queryset` - The queryset that should be used for returning objects from this view. If unset, defaults to the default queryset manager for `self.model`.
*`paginate_by` - The size of pages to use with paginated data. If set to `None` then pagination is turned off. If unset this uses the same value as the `PAGINATE_BY` setting, which defaults to `None`.
*`paginate_by_param` - The name of a query parameter, which can be used by the client to overide the default page size to use for pagination. If unset this uses the same value as the `PAGINATE_BY_PARAM` setting, which defaults to `None`.
*`queryset` - The queryset that should be used when retrieving an object from this view. If unset, defaults to the default queryset manager for `self.model`.
*`pk_kwarg` - The URL kwarg that should be used to look up objects by primary key. Defaults to `'pk'`. [Can only be set to non-default on Django 1.4+]
*`slug_kwarg` - The URL kwarg that should be used to look up objects by a slug. Defaults to `'slug'`. [Can only be set to non-default on Django 1.4+]
*`slug_field` - The field on the model that should be used to look up objects by a slug. If used, this should typically be set to a field with `unique=True`. Defaults to `'slug'`.
The mixin classes provide the actions that are used to provide the basic view behaviour. Note that the mixin classes provide action methods rather than defining the handler methods such as `.get()` and `.post()` directly. This allows for more flexible composition of behaviour.
