1

I know this is a strange question but I am lost on what to do. i cloned pinry... It is working and up . I am trying to find django.views.generic. I have searched the directory in my text editor, I have looked in django.views. But I cannot see generic (only a folder with the name "generic"). I cant understand where the generic file is . It is used in many imports and to extend classes but I cannot find the file to see the import functions. I have a good understanding of files and imports and i would say at this stage I am just above noob level. So is there something I am missing here. How come i cannot find this file? If i go to from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse, I can easly find this but not eg : from django.views.generic import CreateView

Where is generic?

Curious Lambda
  • 537
  • 2
  • 7
  • 21

1 Answers1

3

Try running this from a Python interpreter: 

>>> import django.views.generic
>>> django.views.generic.__file__

This will show you the location of the gerneric as a string path. In my case the output is:

'/.../python3.5/site-packages/django/views/generic/__init__.py'

If you look at this __init__.py you will not see the code for any of the generic *View classes. However, these classes can still be imported from the path django.views.generic (if I am not mistaken, this is because the *View classes are part of the __all__ list in django/views/generic/__init__.py). In the case of CreateView, it is actually in django/views/generic/edit.py, although it can be imported from django.views.generic, because of the way the __init__.py is set up.

This is technique is generally useful when you want to find the path to a .py file. Also useful: if you use it on its own in a script (print(__file__)), it will give you the path to the script itself.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
elethan
  • 16,408
  • 8
  • 64
  • 87