Question

I have a model:

class ProjectBookmark(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User)
    project = models.ForeignKey('Project')

say a user is viewing a project, is there a way to somehow check if current project is in users bookmarks other than a nasty way I do this now via request context as bellow? Basically, users bookmarks are a list of projects and checked as

{% if current_project in current_user.bookmarks %}…

right from inside the template?

the_user = request.user
bookmarked_projects = list()
for b in ProjectBookmark.objects.filter(user = request.user):
    bookmarked_projects.append(b.project_id)
the_user.bookmarks = Project.objects.filter(id__in=bookmarked_projects)
return {'current_user':request.user}

Answer 1

For use directly in a template, the best way to go would be creating a custom template tag. Check out the template tag docs.

As for the filtering code itself, it would be very helpful to provide related_name arguments to the ForeignKey fields in the model definition. For example:

class ProjectBookmark(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name="project_bookmarks")
    project = models.ForeignKey('Project', related_name="bookmarks")

This way you could access a QuerySet object containing all the users bookmarks using request.user.project_bookmarks.all()