reverse() in tutorial part 4 should use the function itself rather than the string representation

[alberto@…]

In the vote() function example, at the tutorial part 4 (​http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/tutorial04/), it's better to use

def vote(request, poll_id):
  ...
  return HttpResponseRedirect(reverse(results, args=(p.id,)))

rather then

def vote(request, poll_id):
  ...
  return HttpResponseRedirect(reverse('mysite.polls.views.results', args=(p.id,)))

to decouple the polls app from the mysite project.

[Chris Beaven]

There are more places than this needed to fix to decouple the app.

That said, this specific change isn't a bad idea, is it?

[James Bennett]

Probably the most reliable thing is to use a named pattern; that would get people into the habit of naming their patterns which, in turn, reduces the potential for problems from multiple URLs using the same view function.

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

This change would be a bad idea. Using reverse() against function objects is very fragile. The problem is that they are automatically imported under different paths and it is officially Very Hard(tm) in Python to tell when they are the same object (short of md5-summing the code objects, which seems like overkill). And, really, I don't care very much that that's case, since using named URL patterns is safer and saner on a number of levels.

Eventually, there's a bit of a sanity pass needed over the code samples in the tutorial to bring them all into alignment and using URL patterns (after introducing them earlier) is probably the best idea. However, the change suggested here, although well intentioned actually leads to subtle trouble.