Question

I have a tree structure in memory that I would like to render in HTML using a Django template.

class Node():   name = 'node name'   children = [] 

There will be some object root that is a Node, and children is a list of Nodes. root will be passed in the content of the template.

I have found this one discussion of how this might be achieved, but the poster suggests this might not be good in a production environment.

Does anybody know of a better way?

Answer 1

I think the canonical answer is: ‘Don’t’.

What you should probably do instead is unravel the thing in your view code, so it’s just a matter of iterating over (in|de)dents in the template. I think I’d do it by appending indents and dedents to a list while recursing through the tree and then sending that ‘travelogue’ list to the template. (the template would then insert <li> and </li> from that list, creating the recursive structure with ‘understanding’ it.)

I’m also pretty sure recursively including template files is really a wrong way to do it…