Question

I’m really new to Django. I’m having difficulty displaying images based on their name and according to the url pattern.

So basically the url consists of several variables within them and I want to be able to use that to fetch a particular image that is named with those variables.

Example:

localhost:8080/farm/chicken

this would fetch an image inside of my ../static/images/ folder and get:

farm_chicken.jpg

Another example:

localhost:8080/zoo/alligator

would get:

zoo_alligator.jpg

I can fetch the url parameters. So, should I make these image names within my views.py file and pass the names (zoo_alligator) into a context to be retrieved by the template later on? Would this be the correct way?

Thank you for your advice everybody! I appreciate all the help!

Answer 1

So, should I make these image names within my views.py file and pass
the names (zoo_alligator) into a context to be retrieved by the
template later on? Would this be the correct way?

Sure, this is one way to do it. Something like this:

(r'show/(?P<in_path>.*)$','someapp.image_view')

Then in image_view:

def image_view(request,in_path):
    img = in_path.replace('/','_')+'.jpg'
    return render(request,'some_template.html',{'path':img})

However, as your view is very simple – you can pass the path directly to the template from urls.py, using direct_to_template:

from django.views.generic.simple import direct_to_template

(r'show/(?P<in_path>.*)$',direct_to_template,{'template':'some_template.html'})

In some_template.html:

<img src="{{ params.in_path }}">

The problem is that you won’t get your string formatting done as the default filters do not have a “replace” function. You can easily write a custom filter:

@register.filter
@stringfilter
def format_path(the_path):
    return the_path.replace('/','_')+'.jpg'

Then modify the template:

<img src="{{ params.in_path|format_path }}">

You should read the documentation on writing custom filters and tags for more details including where to store the filter code to make sure django can find it.