Documentation often overlooks class-based views

[Daniel Quinn]

While the explanation of what CBVs are and why we use them is concise, there isn't much in the way of covering how to use them with different components in Django. Many examples show only how to use a feature with function-based views, with no explanation as to how this would translate to CBVs. Below I've listed some sections that could use some attention:

• ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/http/sessions/#setting-test-cookies
• ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/http/sessions/#examples
• ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/auth/default/#the-login-required-decorator
• ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/cache/#the-per-view-cache
• ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/cache/#using-vary-headers
• ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/cache/#controlling-cache-using-other-headers
• ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/pagination/#using-paginator-in-a-view
• ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/conditional-view-processing/#the-condition-decorator

[Tim Graham]

Hopefully we can do this in a way that doesn't require two examples for every case. Maybe a more general "translating between function and class-based views" overview would be useful.

[Daniel Quinn]

I agree, this would be preferable. Should it just be an addendum to the existing "Class Based Views" page, or something separate?

[Daniel Quinn]

Actually, now that I look at the CBV docs, there appears to be everything covered there, it just wasn't immediately obvious from the URLs above where I needed to look to do things like use @login_required in a CBV. Maybe it's just a question of prioritising function-based over class-based, and that's fine if that's the case, but some way to point to these docs when referencing things like decorators would be handy.

[Tim Graham]

Yea, not sure. It seems a bit annoying to link to that doc on every decorator, but maybe it could be done tastefully.

[Tim Graham]

Feel free to reopen if you want to provide a patch. Not sure it's terribly high priority.