Open Assembly deviates from the traditional approach found in Django concerning Views. Instead of developing a views.py function for different types of content, we have a single view that loads template files, where template tags take the place of the logic traditionally found in views.py in a Django project.
Template tags are similar to Django template tags if you are familiar with those. They can be easily added to html files. These templates are rendered before the page loads, so they can also be used to procedurally generate javascript code. Combining template tags and javascript can be quite powerful.
This function calls pp_consensus_get from the consensustags module and displays the interest attribute of the pirate_consensus.models.Consensus object. There are a few things happening here within the pp_consensus_get function.
You can easily filter the data from the template tag’s context using other templatetags found in Django libraries or elsewhere.
<body>
{% pp_consensus_get object=object.pk %}
<div>
{% if pp_consensus.consensus.interest > 1000 %}
<a href="{{object.get_absolute_url}}">{{ pp_consensus.consensus.interest|floatformat:0 }}</a>
{% else %}
<a href="{{object.get_absolute_url}}">{{ pp_consensus.consensus.interest|floatformat:1 }}</a>
{% endif %}
</div>
{% endpp_consensus_get %}
</body>
As you can see the function relies on the object variable, which is loaded by the oa_cache module. For designers all you really need to know is that the following is available to you as Django template objects in any template you create. These are commonly used as parameters to template tag functions, or can be used to populate the template with contextual data you are presenting to the user.
| object: | django.db.models.Model object |
|---|---|
| user: | django.contrib.auth.User object of logged in user |
| start: | start integer for pagination |
| end: | end integer for pagination |
| dimension: | dimension string for sorting or filtering, usually reserved for lists |
Here’s an example of how one might use these objects in a template.
<h2><a href="{{object.get_absolute_url}}">{{object.summary}}</a></h2>
{% if user == object %}
Welcome home {{user.username}}.
{% pp_get_messages start=start end=end user=user %}
{% for message in pp_messages.all reversed %}
<div>
{{note.description}}
</div>
{% endfor %}
{% endpp_get_messages %}
{% endif %}
Django allows you to drop links into your templates fairly easily. You need to use the pp_url template tag.
This block tag will produce a url that will link to the designated view or pattern name, and then will optionally populate the request passed to that view with either a specific ORM object, or a numerical range (start...end), as long as the pirate_core.url_middleware.UrlMiddleware is included in the projects’ MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES. Any kwargs included in addition to “view”, “object”, “start” and “end” will be passed to redirect in order to produce the url for the designated view.
The default value for “view” is “pp-page”, which expects that the kwarg “template” be included, passing in the name of the template being linked to.
For example:
{% pp_url object=object template="filename.html" %}
{% pp_url template="filename.html" start=0 end=30 dimension="n" %}
{% pp_url template="filename.html" %}
Try the following from the Django shell from manage.py in the openassembly directory.
python manage.py shell
>>> from django import template
>>> from pirate_topics.models import Topic
>>> topic = Topic(summary="A test topic.", shortname="test-topic", description="test", group_members=0)
>>> topic.save()
>>> load = "{% load pp_url %}"
>>> ts = "{% pp_url template='example.html' object=topic %}"
>>> template.Template(load + ts).render(template.Context({'topic':topic}))
u'/p/example/k-test-topic'
>>> ts = "{% pp_url template='example.html' object=topic start=0 end=30 %}"
>>> template.Template(load + ts).render(template.Context({'topic':topic}))
u'/p/example/k-test-topic/s-0/e-30'
>>> ts = "{% pp_url template='example.html' start=0 end=30 dimension='new' %}"
>>> template.Template(load + ts).render(template.Context({'topic':topic}))
u'/p/example/s-0/e-30/d-new'
>>> topic.delete()