Question

In Django’s urls.py, I know that you can specify an optional parameter to pass to a view for a single url() object. My question is, is it possible to specify the same optional parameter and have it apply to every single url() inside a patterns() object.

Answer 1

I don’t think so, but you can simply use a variable:

d = { 'foo' : very_long_value }

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url('^aaaa/$', 'aaa', d),
    url('^bbbb/$', 'bbb', d),
    url('^cccc/$', 'ccc', d),
)

If you want to be able to add values to some urls on the fly, you can do the following:

def add_dict(d, **kw):
    x = d.copy()
    x.update(kw)
    return x

d = { 'foo' : very_long_argument }

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url('^aaaa/$', 'aaa', d),
    url('^bbbb/$', 'bbb', d),
    url('^cccc/$', 'ccc', add_dict(d, bar = 'xxx')),
)

Or alternatively you can write your own url wrapper:

def my_url(regex, view, kwargs=None, name=None, prefix=''):
    if kwargs is None:
        kwargs = {}
    kwargs.update(foo = very_long_argument)
    return url(regex, view, kwargs, name, prefix)

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    my_url('^aaaa/$', 'aaa'),
    my_url('^bbbb/$', 'bbb'),
    my_url('^cccc/$', 'ccc' { 'bar' : 'xxx'),
)