List View – Function based Views Django

Last Updated : 25 Apr, 2025

List View refers to a view (logic) to list all or particular instances of a table from the database in a particular order. It is used to display multiple types of data on a single page or view, for example, products on an eCommerce page. Django provides extra-ordinary support for List Views but let’s check how it is done manually through a function-based view. This article revolves around list View which involves concepts such as Django Forms, Django Models.
For List View, we need a project with some models and multiple instances which will be displayed.

Django List View – Function Based Views

Illustration of How to create and use List view using an Example. Consider a project named geeksforgeeks having an app named geeks.

Refer to the following articles to check how to create a project and an app in Django.

How to Create a Basic Project using MVT in Django?
How to Create an App in Django ?

After you have a project and an app, let’s create a model of which we will be creating instances through our view. In geeks/models.py,

Python3

# import the standard Django Model
# from built-in library
from django.db import models
  
# declare a new model with a name "GeeksModel"
class GeeksModel(models.Model):
 
    # fields of the model
    title = models.CharField(max_length = 200)
    description = models.TextField()
 
    # renames the instances of the model
    # with their title name
    def __str__(self):
        return self.title

After creating this model, we need to run two commands in order to create Database for the same.

Python manage.py makemigrations Python manage.py migrate

Now let’s create some instances of this model using shell, run form bash,

Python manage.py shell

Enter following commands

>>> from geeks.models import GeeksModel >>> GeeksModel.objects.create(                        title="title1",                        description="description1").save() >>> GeeksModel.objects.create(                        title="title2",                        description="description2").save() >>> GeeksModel.objects.create(                        title="title2",                        description="description2").save()

Now we have everything ready for back end. Verify that instances have been created from http://localhost:8000/admin/geeks/geeksmodel/

Let’s create a view and template for the same. In geeks/views.py,

Python3

from django.shortcuts import render
 
# relative import of forms
from .models import GeeksModel
 
 
def list_view(request):
    # dictionary for initial data with 
    # field names as keys
    context ={}
 
    # add the dictionary during initialization
    context["dataset"] = GeeksModel.objects.all()
         
    return render(request, "list_view.html", context)

Create a template in templates/list_view.html,

html

<div class="main">
 
    {% for data in dataset %}.
 
    {{ data.title }}<br/>
    {{ data.description }}<br/>
    <hr/>
 
    {% endfor %}
 
</div>

Let’s check what is there on http://localhost:8000/

Bingo..!! list view is working fine. One can also display filtered items or order them in different orders based on various features. Let’s order the items in reverse manner.
In geeks/views.py,

Python3

from django.shortcuts import render
 
# relative import of models
from .models import GeeksModel
 
 
def list_view(request):
    # dictionary for initial data with 
    # field names as keys
    context ={}
 
    # add the dictionary during initialization
    context["dataset"] = GeeksModel.objects.all().order_by("-id")
         
    return render(request, "list_view.html", context)

order_by to arrange instances in different orders

Now visit http://localhost:8000/

filter to show selective instances

Let’s create a different instance to show how filter works. Run

Python manage.py shell

Now, create another instance,

from geeks.models import GeeksModel GeeksModel.objects.create(title = "Naveen", description = "GFG is Best").save()

Now visit http://localhost:8000/

Let’s filter this data to those containing word “title” in their title.
In geeks/views.py,

Python3

from django.shortcuts import render
 
# relative import of forms
from .models import GeeksModel
 
 
def list_view(request):
    # dictionary for initial data with 
    # field names as keys
    context ={}
 
    # add the dictionary during initialization
    context["dataset"] = GeeksModel.objects.all().filter(
        title__icontains = "title"
    )
         
    return render(request, "list_view.html", context)