Using django's generic views for listing objects

Django comes equipped with generic views: A set of pre-made view functions that help you do repetitive stuff with less hassles.

One of the most common thing that you will do in a web application is to pull data from the database and show them to the user, as a list or table. Using django's object_list generic view, you can do this with minimum code.

An example of using the generic view

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# import the generic views
from django.views.generic.list_detail import object_list
from models import MyObjects

def view_list(request):

   template_path = "mytemplate.html"
   response_dict = {}

   myobjects = MyObject.objects.filter(name__istartswith="Mike")

   return object_list(request, queryset=myobjects,
                      template_name=template_path,
                      paginate_by=3,
                      page=page,
                      template_object_name="templateobject",
                      extra_context=response_dict)

The above view will return to your template a list called "templateobject_list" which contains models of myobjects.
For more details on the parameters for object_list(), check the Django documentation here: Django object_list manual