Utilizing Generic Django Views

The use of generic Django views can aid in app development. As an example, let's write a view which displays a random animal and the sound it makes. First, create the view in views.py:

# views.py
from django.shortcuts import render
from django.views.generic import View

from .models import Animal


class RandomAnimalView(View):
    """Display a randomly-selected Animal."""

    def get(self, request):
        animal = Animal.objects.order_by('?').first()
        return render(request, 'nautobot_animal_sounds/animal.html', {
            'animal': animal,
        })

This view retrieves a random animal from the database and and passes it as a context variable when rendering a template named animal.html, which doesn't exist yet. To create this template, first create a directory named templates/nautobot_animal_sounds/ within the app source directory. (We use the app's name as a subdirectory to guard against naming collisions with other apps.) Then, create a template named animal.html as described below.