Feb
5
One thing about Django views that I personally find a bit annoying is using dictionary notation when building the context to pass to my templates. I don't find this a big deal for smaller views, but sometimes I have quite a bit of variables to pass back to my template. Organization, readability and maintainability often do not come in the syntactic form of a large dictionary of random objects.
I have been doing this for a few months now and thought I would share.
class AttrContext():
""" Useful for dot notation context. """
def __init__(self, **kwargs):
self.update(kwargs)
def __str__(self):
return "\n".join(["%s: %s" % (k,v) for k,v in self.dict().iteritems()])
def dict(self):
rdict = {}
for key, value in self.__dict__.iteritems():
rdict[key] = value.dict() if isinstance(value, self.__class__) else value
return rdict
def update(self, data):
for key, value in data.iteritems():
setattr(self, key, value)
This generic little class makes it easier to simply add class variables to the object, and later convert this to a dictionary for Django goodness. The obligatory example usage is below. The variable vars is my context.
def summary(request, uuid):
vars = AttrContext(request=request)
vars.menuitem = 'accounts'
vars.tabitem = 'summary'
vars.baseurl = reverse('account', kwargs={'uuid':uuid})
vars.account = get_object_or_404(Account, user_uuid=uuid)
# Create and render the template
template = "dashboard/account/summary.html"
contextInstance = RequestContext(request)
return render_to_response(template, vars.dict(), contextInstance)
Maybe it's useful for some others. :)
