Alternative Way of Specifying URL Patterns

[Sven R. Kunze]

Other frameworks (like MVC 5) provide an inline-way of specifying the URL pattern for a view.

Would it be possible to introduce such thing for Django?

Internally, we are working on something like this in order to accelerate development and maintenance for our production system.

Manually looking up URLs in the url.py and then jump to the actual view class is quite error-prone and tedious.

Internally, we evaluate two alternatives:

1) via class attribute: url
2) via decorator on class

# alternative 1
class ThingView(DetailView):
    url = '/thing(?P<pk>\d+)'
    template_name = 'thing.html'

# alternative 2
@url('/thing/(?P<pk>\d+)'):
class ThingView(DetailView):
    template_name = 'thing.html'

[Tim Graham]

You could propose it on the DevelopersMailingList (I couldn't find a past discussion from a quick seach), but I doubt we'd want to add another way of defining URLs. If you really want this in your own projects, you could possibly write an implantation that lives in each app's urls.py file and "autodiscovers" the URLs defined by your views according to whatever convention you want to use.