CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythondjangodjango-templatesdjango-views
madtyn
madtyn

Reputation: 1559

Advice about composing several django templates

I'm developing a web application with Django and we have met a dilemma about the design.

We were making one template for every screen, but right now we have detected that some parts of of the screen with the information are repeated all over the different screens. For example, when coming to show personal data of a person, you can show also another data concerning that person, but not personal data (financial data, for instance).

My intuition told me that we should look for a solution in which we could make small templates that we could compose, combine and concatenate and that we should also make different views or functions which would return its own associated template each one.

Thus, person_data() would return the rendered template showing the name, surname, address, etc... and financial_data() would return the rendered template showing the salary, bank account, etc... After that, the desirable thing would be concatenating both or inserting them in a wider template for showing all this together.

<html>
    ...
    {# Html code here #}
    ...
    {# person_data template #}
    ...
    ...
    {# financial_data template #}
    ...
    {# Html code here #}
    ...
</html>

So as always I made some research on the net and I found:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/#include

a link which describes how to use include for inserting a template file in another template:

{% include "foo/bar.html" %}

And you can also use a variable from the python function with the path name or an object with render method:

{% include template_name %}

So we could use all this in this way for combining, concatenating, composing and operating on templates. We could choose the one which includes the others and passing it the context for all templates (I suppose, I didn't test anything). But I don't know if I'm well directed or if this is the best way to go. I would appreciate some advice.

I also found another interesting thread in stackoverflow talking about this: How do you insert a template into another template?

My idea is to have small templates which are used repeatedly in different spots of the web and composing them in Unix-like style, so I would have small visual pieces that would be used once and again saving a lot of hours of writing of code.

Please some advice. Thanks in advance

Upvotes: 0

Views: 113

Answers (1)

thomas
thomas

Reputation: 1174

Yes, that is a correct approach. I think the best solution is to combine {% include %} and {% extend %}, which will allow you to inherit from a base template (via extend), and include parts you want from other templates (via include).

You'd end up having a base template, a template for the header, the footer, parts of the body etc.

You might also want to read more about it here and here

Upvotes: 3

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