How to generate urls in django

I'm using two different approaches in my models.py. The first is the permalink decorator:

from django.db.models import permalink

def get_absolute_url(self): 
    """Construct the absolute URL for this Item."""
    return ('project.app.views.view_name', [str(self.id)])
get_absolute_url = permalink(get_absolute_url)

You can also call reverse directly:

from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse

def get_absolute_url(self): 
    """Construct the absolute URL for this Item."""
    return reverse('project.app.views.view_name', None, [str(self.id)])

If you need to use something similar to the {% url %} template tag in your code, Django provides the django.core.urlresolvers.reverse(). The reverse function has the following signature:

reverse(viewname, urlconf=None, args=None, kwargs=None)

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/urlresolvers/

At the time of this edit the import is django.urls import reverse