All of these views are used by creating configuration dictionaries in your URLconf files and passing those dictionaries as the third member of the URLconf tuple for a given pattern.
\nFor example, here\u2019s a simple URLconf you could use to present a static \u201cabout\u201d page:<\/p>\n
from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
\nfrom django.views.generic.simple import direct_to_template<\/p>\n
urlpatterns = patterns(”,
\n(‘^about\/$’, direct_to_template, {
\n‘template’: ‘about.html’
\n})
\n)<\/p>\n
Though this might seem a bit \u201cmagical\u201d at first glance \u2014 look, a view with no code! \u2014, it\u2019s actually exactly the same as the examples in earlier chapter: the direct_to_template view simply grabs information from the extra-parameters dictionary and uses that information when rendering the view. Because this generic view \u2014 and all the others \u2014 is a regular view functions like any other, we can reuse it inside our own views. As an example, let\u2019s extend our \u201cabout\u201d example to map URLs of the form \/about\/<whatever>\/ to statically rendered about\/<whatever>.html. We\u2019ll do this by first modifying the URLconf to point to a view function:<\/p>\n
from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
\nfrom django.views.generic.simple import direct_to_template
\nfrom mysite.books.views import about_pages<\/p>\n
urlpatterns = patterns(”,
\n(‘^about\/$’, direct_to_template, {
\n‘template’: ‘about.html’
\n}),
\n(‘^about\/(w+)\/$’, about_pages),
\n)<\/p>\n
Next, we\u2019ll write the about_pages view:<\/p>\n
from django.http import Http404
\nfrom django.template import TemplateDoesNotExist
\nfrom django.views.generic.simple import direct_to_template<\/p>\n
def about_pages(request, page):
\ntry:
\nreturn direct_to_template(request, template=”about\/%s.html” % page)
\nexcept TemplateDoesNotExist:
\nraise Http404()<\/p>\n
Here we\u2019re treating direct_to_template like any other function. Since it returns an HttpResponse, we can simply return it as-is. The only slightly tricky business here is dealing with missing templates. We don\u2019t want a nonexistent template to cause a server error, so we catch TemplateDoesNotExist exceptions and return 404 errors instead.<\/p>\n