#22218: Deprecate 'prefix' arg to django.conf.urls.patterns
------------------------------------------------+------------------------
Reporter: carljm | Owner: nobody
Type: Cleanup/optimization | Status: new
Component: Core (URLs) | Version: 1.6
Severity: Normal | Keywords:
Triage Stage: Unreviewed | Has patch: 0
Needs documentation: 0 | Needs tests: 0
Patch needs improvement: 0 | Easy pickings: 0
UI/UX: 0 |
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In the olden days of Django, it was encouraged to reference views as
strings in url patterns:
{{{
urlpatterns = patterns('',
url('^$', 'myapp.views.myview'),
)
}}}
and Django would magically import "myapp.views.myview" internally and turn
the string into a real function reference.
In order to reduce repetition when referencing many views from the same
module, the `patterns` function takes a required initial "prefix" arg,
which is prepended to all views-as-strings in that set of url patterns:
{{{
urlpatterns = patterns('myapp.views',
url('^$', 'myview'),
url('^other/$', 'otherview'),
)
}}}
In the modern era, we have updated the tutorial to instead recommend
actually importing your views module and referencing your view functions
(or classes) directly. This has a number of advantages, all deriving from
the fact that we are now using Normal Python in place of Django String
Magic: the errors when you mistype a view name are less obscure, IDEs can
help with autocompleting view names, etc.
With the advent of the class-based generic views, it is even more likely
that users are referencing view callables directly in their urlconf, due
to the need to call `.as_view()`.
So these days, the above use of the prefix arg is much more likely to be
written (and is better written) as:
{{{
from myapp import views
urlpatterns = patterns('',
url('^$', views.myview),
url('^other/$', views.otherview),
)
}}}
This leaves the 'prefix' arg in modern Django code as a useless empty
string that has to be passed to every invocation of `patterns`. This is an
ugly API wart, and a burden when teaching new users (answering the
newbie's question "why do I need this empty string as the first argument
to patterns?" requires either a time-wasting detour into the history of
Django URLconfs or a hand-wavy "don't worry, just do it").
I suggest that we deprecate this argument. This will require type-checking
the first argument to `patterns` for the duration of the deprecation
period, but I don't think that's so bad.
(I would not be opposed to deprecating the entire views-as-strings
feature, but the additional gain there is only code we can remove and stop
maintaining, not a benefit to the public API, so I decided to keep this
proposal minimal. If there's consensus to deprecate the entire feature, I
will happily update the summary to reflect that.)
--
Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/22218>
Django <https://code.djangoproject.com/>
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