Question

In my python Google App Engine app, the design for most of my pages is identical, so I created page.html as a basic template. The content for each individual page is in a .txt file. In my .py script I do this:

pageFile = open("content.txt", "r")
pageText = pageFile.read();
pageFile.close()

And then this

template_values = {
   'full_name': full_name,
   'notification': notification,
   'pageText': pageText
   }

   path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'page.html')

When the page is rendered the pageText content does get inserted, but the Django template markup (like {{full_name}}) doesn’t get parsed. Which is my problem. I suspect the solution to this is to render the html file twice, once to load in the content and once to parse the Django template stuff, but I can’t find any resources about how to do this. Any help appreciated.

EDIT: specific view code

Instruction page

class Instruction(webapp.RequestHandler):
def get(self):

    checkUser(self)
    checkProfile(self)
    flowControl(self, 0)

    prepareHeader(self)

    global notification

    try:
        notification
    except NameError:
        notification = ""

    pageFile = open("instruction.txt", "r")
    pageText = pageFile.read();
    pageFile.close()

    template_values = {
        'url': url,
        'url_linktext': url_linktext,
        'user': user,
        'pageText': pageText,
        'footerText': footerText,
        'notification': notification
    }

    global instruction, refresh
    instruction = True
    refresh = True

    path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'instruction.html')
    self.response.out.write(template.render(path, template_values))

Answer 1

You can use the Django include template tag. Or template inheritance.

This example includes the contents of the template “foo/bar.html”:

{% include "foo/bar.html" %}

This example includes the contents of the template whose name is contained in the variable template_name:

{% include template_name %}