What is the difference between using TemplateView and ListView in Django?

Question

In the database, I have a set of questions. I want to display every question in a collapsible item as a list. Previously I used TemplateView:

class questionmanager(TemplateView):
    template_name = 'questionmanager.html'
    questions = Question.objects.all() 

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        context = ({
            'questions': self.questions,
        })
        return context  

Then, I read that using ListView is better practice to represent a list of objects. Then I changed my class to this:

class QuestionListView(ListView):
    model = Question

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        context = super(QuestionListView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs)
        return context

In the old template I used this for loop:

{% for question in questions %}

I thought I wouldn't need to use a for loop when I use ListView instead of TemplateView; but I couldn't list the items without a for loop. I found an example here, and it seems to me, the only difference is that in the for loop we use object_list ( {% for question in **object_list** %}) instead of using argument that we pass in the context.

I really don't see so much difference between using TemplateView and ListView - after spending an hour on this. I'd appreciate if someone explains why using ListView instead of TemplateView is a better practice (in this case).

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

For simple use cases such as this, there isn't much difference. However, the ListView in this example is much cleaner as it can be reduced to:

class QuestionListView(ListView):
    model = Question

considering you aren't putting anything in the context. TemplateView's as a base view are rather rudimentary, and provide a much smaller set of methods and attributes to work with for the more complex use cases, meaning you have to write more code in such instances. If you take a look and compare both views TemplateView and ListView here, you can see the difference more clearly. Pagination is a good example, to paginate a ListView you simply set the paginate_by attribute and modify your template accordingly.

Also note, you can change the default name object_list by setting context_object_name in the 'ListView'