Class-based views

In most Flask apps, views are handled by functions. However, when many views share common functionality or there are pieces of code that could be broken out into separate functions, it would be useful to implement our views as classes to take advantage of inheritance.

For example, if we have views that render a template, we could create a generic view class that keeps our code DRY:

from flask.views import View

class GenericView(View):
    def __init__(self, template):
        self.template = template
        super(GenericView, self).__init__()

    def dispatch_request(self):
        return render_template(self.template)

app.add_url_rule(
    '/', view_func=GenericView.as_view(
        'home', template='home.html'
    )
)

The first thing to note about this code is the dispatch_request() function in our view class. This is the function in our view that acts as the normal view function and returns an HTML string. The app.add_url_rule() function...