Getting Started¶

The idea here is to take a object and render it based off of its content type.

django-renderit is one template tag called renderit and it takes a bunch of different parameters to determine what template to render.

Basic Usage¶

{% load renderit %}

{% renderit object %}

This will render object using the default template, which is:

'/renderit/default.html'

You can then create a template that is object specific, for example, if the object is a``auth.user`` instance, it will look for this template:

'/renderit/auth_user.html'

Extra Arguments¶

We can add extra arguments to further make this template unique, for example, lets say we want to render the authentication information for websites that required logged in users. We would normally have some html on our base template, such as

<html>
    <head>MySite</head>
    <body>
        <div class="auth">
            Welcome,
            {% if request.user.is_authenticated %}
                {{ request.user.username }}, <a href="/profile/">Profile</a> <a href="/logout/">Logout</a>
            {% else %}
                Guest, <a href="/login/">Login</a> or <a href="/register/">Register</a>
            {% endif %}
        </div>
        <div class="content">
            ...
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

renderit‘s goal is to take these little blocks of code and seperate them out in there own specific, resuable templates, and to clean up the main templates.

{% load renderit %}
<html>
    <head>MySite</head>
    <body>
        {% renderit request.user auth %}
        <div class="content">
            ...
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

The above example takes an extra argument auth, this can be a context variable or taken literally. If auth not a variable in the template then renderit will take is as a string:

'/renderit/auth_user_auth.html'

Any arguments specified after the object, will be appended to the end of the template name.

While the above example can be used with django’s include tag in the same way, a better use case would be when your dealing with a list of gerneric objects.

Lets take the following models:

class DummyEntry(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    body = models.TextField()
    publish_date = models.DateTimeField(default=datetime.datetime.now)
    author = models.CharField(max_length=200)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title


class DummyBookmark(models.Model):
    url = models.URLField()
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200)


class DummyVideo(models.Model):
    url = models.URLField()
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200)


class DummyImage(models.Model):
    url = models.URLField()
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200)


class RelatedContent(models.Model):
    entry = models.ForeignKey(DummyEntry)
    content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
    object_id = models.IntegerField()
    content_object = generic.GenericForeignKey('content_type', 'object_id')
    add_date = models.DateTimeField(default=datetime.datetime.now)

Lets create and add the content to a generic list:

bm_ctype = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(DummyBookmark)
vi_ctype = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(DummyVideo)
im_ctype = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(DummyImage)
en_ctype = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(DummyEntry)


entry = DummyEntry.objects.create(
    title="This is an example entry",
    body="This is only an example entry",
    author="John Smith")

bm = DummyBookmark.objects.create(
    url="http://google.com",
    name="Google")

vid = DummyVideo.objects.create(
    url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K24mFGlJij0&playnext=1&list=PL4A64BDBA5F9629AE",
    name="Django's Caravan - Gypsy Jazz Guitar - Leigh Jackson")

img1 = DummyImage.objects.create(
    url="http://www.flickr.com/photos/alisonlyons/5678882139/",
    name="Fair Exchange From alison lyons photography")

RelatedContent.objects.create(
    entry=entry,
    content_type=bm_ctype,
    object_id=bm.pk)

RelatedContent.objects.create(
    entry=entry,
    content_type=vi_ctype,
    object_id=vid.pk)

RelatedContent.objects.create(
    entry=entry,
    content_type=im_ctype,
    object_id=img.pk)

RelatedContent.objects.create(
    entry=entry,
    content_type=en_ctype,
    object_id=entry.pk)

related_objects = RelatedContent.objects.all()

When related_content is used in your template, there will be 4 different types of objects. If we dont want they all to look the same, for example have a image show up for DummyImage types or embdeded video player for DummyVideo types, the way we can do that is to have a bunch of if statements to check the type of object, but thats ugly, and can clutter up the template. Enstead renderit will know the type of object you are trying to render and use the appropriete template.

{% for obj in related_content %}
    {% renderit obj %}
{% endfor %}

When we output the template list that is created for each item in the loop above, it will look something like this:

[u'renderit/sample_app_dummybookmark.html', 'renderit/default.html']
[u'renderit/sample_app_dummyvideo.html', 'renderit/default.html']
[u'renderit/sample_app_dummyimage.html', 'renderit/default.html']
[u'renderit/sample_app_dummyentry.html', 'renderit/default.html']

We can then create the templates and make them custom to the type of object.

Python Objects¶

While the examples shown are specific to django models, we can pass in any object and its type will be used (slugified) to build the template. If we have a python dictionary, the template will be:

'/renderit/dict.html'

Of course this is rather broad, so we should pass in extra arguments to ensure its specific to what we use it for

{% renderit dict_obj top10 %}

The template that will be looked for first would be:

'/renderit/dict_top10.html'

Fallback¶

Fallback template paths are generated based on the arguments supplied, which the last possbiel template being ‘/renderit/default.html’. Read more about Template Fallback

Site Specific¶

In the event you are using sites, and the templates you need rendered are structurally different, you can enable site groups to further distingish the templates that are rendered.

This is similar to how groups are parsed, but they fallback to the non-site specific templates if not found.

Here is an example of the template difference between site and non-site:

'renderit/section/sample_app_video.html'

And want to create a site specific template:

'renderit/1/section/sample_app_video.html'

We need to either specify site=True in the template tag or enable sites for all templates using the setting SITE_GROUPS and setting it to True

This differs from groups in that they fallback to the non-site specific templates. For example, groups generate a template list like the following:

['renderit/<group1>/<group2>/<template_name>',
 'renderit/<group1>/<template_name>',
 'renderit/<template_name>']

When sites are enabled for the same scenario produces the following template list:

['renderit/<site>/<group1>/<group2>/<template_name>',
 'renderit/<site>/<group1>/<template_name>',
 'renderit/<site>/<template_name>',
 'renderit/<group1>/<group2>/<template_name>',
 'renderit/<group1>/<template_name>',
 'renderit/<template_name>']

Key thing to take away from this, is that we can create templates without any care for sites initially, which may act as defaults, then we can override templates for specific sites.