Django Templates

Templates

To include templates we can use from django.shortcuts import render. The templates directory and template back-end must be declared in setting.configure:

settings.configure(
    ROOT_URLCONF=__name__,
    DEBUG=True,
    SECRET_KEY="secret",
    TEMPLATES=[
        {
            "BACKEND": "django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates",
            "DIRS": [Path(__file__).parent / "templates"]
        }
    ]
)

Note

If we want to use a different backend for templates, such as Jinja2, we can simply change the value of “BACKEND” in settings:

'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.jinja2.Jinja2',

With this, we can update index function to use render, which takes a a request object and a template name as parameters:

def index(request):
    return render(request, "index.html")

Context

The variables and data that are accessible from the templates is referred to as the context (which is related to the Django Context Processors). When creating a view function in Django, we have to pass the required context to the return value in order to access it in HTML:

Caution

If any element in a context lookup chain is missing, the object being passed to the template will fail silently - it simply will not display on the site to avoid showing errors to users.

Filters

We can filter the data being passed into a template by using built-in filters - these work the same in Jinja2 or Django templates and look as follows:

      <p>{{ post.date_added|date:"DATE_FORMAT"}}</p>
      <p>{{ post.body|truncatewords:10 }}</p>