Question

I’m new to Django so this could be a stupid question, however I’m struggling to find an answer searching Goolge. my question is as follows…

In other languages when creating links within HTML pages you have something like a buildURL(page) function that creates a dynamic link i.e.

<a herf="buildURL(pageName,queryObjects) >link</a>  

This would generate the URL with parameters.

Is there a function in Django that builds URLs in the correct format i.e. generate a fully-qualified URL to a Django page with parameters?

Answer 1

In your templates, you never should hard write url view. Instead of this, a good practice is to named each url and reference this name in templates.

To name a url:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, url
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    #...
    url(r'^article/(\d+)/$', 'news.views.article', name='article_by_id'),
    #...
)

To reference url in template:

<ul>
{% for article in articles %}
<li><a href="{% url article_by_id article.pk %}">Article {{article.name}} </a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

Learn more in URL Distpatchar django documentation.