Question

Anyone have a quick url dispatcher example? I’ve looked at the Django documentation but I find that there isn’t a complete example that shows you how everything is working in the views.

Specifically, I’m trying to pass the “url” from one view to another. For example, I am trying to make a holiday website: if a button in “available holidays” view called “europe” is clicked, I want to go to http://www.example.com/selected/europe, where all european holidays are displayed
while if a button in the available holidays view called “Australia” is clicked, I want to go to http://www.example.com/selected/australia where similarly australian holidays are displayed.

So far, in url.py I have:

(r'^selected/(?P<location>\w+)/$', 'app.views.selected'),

in views.py I have:

def selected(request, location)

I’m not sure where to go from there.
Also, how are things going to move from the “available holidays” view to the “selected” view…

Answer 1

From the “available holidays” template, you should link to the locations page.

First, add a “name” argument to your url definition:

(r'^selected/(?P<location>\w+)/$', 'app.views.selected', name='selected_holidays'),

Then, in the “available holidays” templates, link as such:

{% url selected_holidays 'Europe' %}

Of course, use the location variable if in a forloop:

{% for location in locations %}
    <a href="{% url selected_holidays location %}">{{ location }}</a>
{% endfor %}

If location is a model, then you should add a get_absolute_url method to the model e.g.:

from django.core import urlresolvers

class Location(models.Model):
    # ... [snip]
    def get_absolute_url(self):
        return urlresolvers.reverse('selected_holidays', args=(self.location_name,))

Then in the template:

{% for location in locations %}
    <a href="{{ location.get_absolute_url }}">{{ location }}</a>
{% endfor %}

In that case, change the name of the url from ‘selected_holidays’ to ‘location_detail’ if it makes sense – that’s quite a standard in Django.

If you want to be forward compatible, load the future url tag as such:

{% load url from future %}

Then, use a named url string with quotes:

{% url 'selected_holidays' 'Europe' %}

Well I think you got some starters here. You should also overread Django urls manual to know where’s what in case of troubble 🙂 https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/