Upcoming Change: Default View

[peteeckel]

When views were first introduced more than a year ago, I made a design decision that proved suboptimal over the following months: A zone can have a view or not, allowing the view field of a zone object to be None.

There are some features in the upcoming NetBox 4.0 release that would benefit greatly from always having an explicit view, but there's more: For the (hopefully) final implementation of a more automated IPAM integration it is crucial to have explicit views as well, and there is at least one feature in the backlog that will make it easier to scale NetBox DNS to large environments and that also can't be done reasonably without explicit views.

The implementation is planned as follows:

• There is a special view marked as default_view that is assigned to all zones currently having no view at all
• The default view will not show up in the zone label used in lists (exactly like for view=None in the current implementation)
• The default view cannot be deleted, but it can be renamed if desired
• When a zone is created without specifying a view it will automatically be assigned to the default view (again, like it is right now for view=None)

The only thing that changes in the user interface is that the API no longer returns zones with view=None, but always has a view assigned to every zone.

Currently some fine-tuning is going on, but the feature already works and passes all tests (after some tweaking and throwing out tests that referred to zones that explicitly had view set to None. That may require some changes in integrations. @jcollie, what about octodns-netbox-dns?

If all goes according to plan I will provide the new feature in version 1.0b2.