Generic view classes should inherit from TemplateView etc

I’m talking about the classes located in wagtailadmin.views.generic.

They all are inheriting from View. They would be easier to use if inheriting from TemplateView (e.g. adding extra context data with get_context_data).

The Create/Edit/Delete views could also benefit from inheriting at least from FormMixin. Even better if they would inherit from BaseCreateView and so on.

So, any reason why this was not done? I’m willing to do the PR if needed.

Thanks.

[Gagaro]

Thanks for the response. Here’s what I think about it:

I think they’re an unnecessary and counter-productive abstraction

That’s where I disagree. They separate every logical needs so you only have to override what’s necessary. Right now, in the IndexView, I need to override and copy/paste (because what I need to change is located in the middle of the method) the entire get method, which include getting the data, setting the context and the rendering. All that only to add a single variable to the context. Personally, that is what I call counter-productive.

evolving as needed to accommodate them

Most of what we need would already be handled by the CBV provided by Django. And some of those needs are already (not completely) re-implemented by some classes (https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/blob/master/wagtail/wagtailadmin/views/generic.py#L170-L183, https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/blob/master/wagtail/wagtailadmin/views/generic.py#L204-L212).

Generic CBV should be easy to use and with low maintenance for almost every use-case. Right now I need to check at every new Wagtail release that the logic inside these views didn’t changed, otherwise I have to change my own view as well to reflect those changes.

[gasman]

Resolved in #3625