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Writing Views

Django Bridge applications use Django’s views and URL routing for all backend application logic. The only difference from a regular Django application is the response type.

If you’re unfamiliar with Django views, they are Python functions that take a web request and return a web response. In a traditional Django application, the views will return the HTML for the browser to render. See Django’s own Writing Views document if you’re interested in seeing an example.

A simple view​

Here’s a view that renders a component called “CurrentTime” with the current time as the only prop:

import datetime
from django_bridge.response import Response

def current_datetime(request):
    now = datetime.datetime.now()
    return Response(request, “CurrentTime”, {“time” now})

Let’s step through this code one line at a time:

  • First, we import the class Response from django_bridge, along with Python’s datetime library.

  • Next, we define a function called current_datetime. This is the view function. Each view function takes an HttpRequest object as its first parameter, which is typically named request.

    Note that the name of the view function doesn’t matter; it doesn’t have to be named in a certain way in order for Django to recognize it. We’re calling it current_datetime here, because that name clearly indicates what it does.

  • The view returns an Response object that contains the name of the frontend component to render (“CurrentTime”) and the props to pass in to it. We will look at what this component looks like in the next section.

Adding views to your URL config​

All Django projects contain a URL configuration file (usually called urls.pyin the project folder) that defines what views to run at what URLs. There are no differences in how the URL dispatcher works in a Django Bridge application, and you can even mix React-rendered views with template-rendered views.

See Django's URL dispatcher documentation for instructions on how to add views to your URL configuration.