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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-14T09:46:11+00:00

I am working on a project where some templates are stored as part of

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I am working on a project where some templates are stored as part of a ‘theme’ in the database. Because of this, I’m not able to leverage a lot of Django’s nice template rendering functionality immediately. For example:

# Instead of this...
return render_to_response('path/to/template', arguments, context_instance=context)

# Have to do this...
template = Template(model.template_field)
context.update(arguments)
return HttpResponse(template.render(context))

This is fine, however, the problem that I’ve run in to is including sub-templates. If, for example, model.template_field looks like this…

<html>
    <head>
        {% include head_extra %} <!-- Another DB field -->
    </head>
    <body>
        {% include body_extra %} <!-- Another DB field -->
    </body>
 </html>

…Then Django will complain that the template doesn’t exist (because there is no template with that name).

How can I include the sub-templates in a dynamically created template?

Edit (Ignoring the database constraint, and providing more details):
I want users to be able to define their own templates, either via a file upload, or through some editor.

I would like them to be able to include sub-templates via {% include %}, but I don’t want the user to have to worry about where they are including from. Hence, I just want them to include like this: {% include extra_head %}. However, django certainly needs to know where the templates are located in order to load them.

What do people typically do when they want user defined templates in django?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you are willing to waive the requirement that {% include %} statements are needed, you can do things by hand if you try something like this in your view…

    def view(request, id):
    theme = get_object_or_404(Theme, pk=id)
    original_context = RequestContext(request)

    page_context = Context({
        'db_head': Template(theme.head_template).render(original_context),
        'db_body': Template(theme.body_template).render(original_context)
    }

    page = Template(theme.page_template)
    return HttpResponse(page.render(page_context))

    …With a ‘template’ like this:

    <html>
    <head>
        {{ db_head }}
    </head>
    <body>
        {{ db_body }}
    </body>
</html>

    This pattern can work for more deeply nested elements as well provided you build the lowest level templates first. You can include existing templates via render_to_string, but you can still run into problems if you ever want to include something within a loop context.

    A bit kludgy, and not exactly what you’re looking for, but it will work.

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