Question

I made a mistake while writing my Django application in hard coding all the URLs in my templates.

For instance, my links look like:

<a href="/course/63/">Advanced Basketweaving</a>

Now, my client adamantly wants me to change all instances of links akin to this one to

<a href="/class/63/">Advanced Basketweaving</a>

where “class” replaces “course”.

In the words of Emerson, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, so I must pay for my mistake by undertaking a painstaking find and replace operation.

What was the right thing to do here?

Answer 1

Assuming your urls.py had an entry like this:

url(r'^course/(?P<course_id>\d+)/$', view_course, name='view_course')

You could have used the url template tag in your template:

<a href="{% url view_course course.id %}">Advanced Basketweaving</a>

Then when your client asked you to change the urls, you would have to make only one change in your urls.py.

url(r'^class/(?P<course_id>\d+)/$', view_course, name='view_course')

No change would be required in the templates.

Happy search and replacing — now you know for next time 😉