Question

I’m currently writing a Django template template tag, and I would like to be able to reference a class in it with a string, just like in settings.MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES, for example. The tag would look like {% mytag "myproject.lib.mymodule.SomeClass" %}.

The question is fairly simple : in my template tag, how may I easily resolve this string to the actual referenced class?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you really need to import a package specified as a string, you will need to check out the __import__ function.

Basic usage is that you can attempt to import the package specified in the string like

my_class = __import__("myproject.lib.mymodule.SomeClass")

which is equivalent to

import myproject.lib.mymodule.SomeClass as my_class

However, as S.Lott mentioned, you’ll need to consider carefully if that’s really the best way to solve the problem.