> 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.
class UserList(generics.ListCreateAPIView):
serializer = UserSerializer
model = User
permissions = (IsAdminUser,)
paginate_by = 100
For more complex cases you might also want to override various methods on the view class. For example.
class UserList(generics.ListCreateAPIView):
serializer = UserSerializer
model = User
permissions = (IsAdminUser,)
def get_paginate_by(self):
"""
Use smaller pagination for HTML representations.
"""
if self.request.accepted_media_type == 'text/html':
return 10
return 100
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 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.
