Question

In my view, if I specify

def myView(request):
    return render_to_response('myTemplate.html', {'user': request.user,}, 
        context_instance=RequestContext(request))

then I can access settings such as STATIC_URL in myTemplate.html.

However, if I specify

def myView(request):
        return render_to_response('myTemplate.html', {'user': request.user,})

then I cannot access STATIC_URL. In this latter case, {{ STATIC_URL }} just yields an empty string in the rendered page. In the former case, {{ STATIC_URL }} yields the proper string for the static URL (“/static/”).

Why do I need to send a request context to access the STATIC_URL setting in my template?

I am running Django 1.4 on Apache 2.

Answer 1

Read the docs for a better answer. But there is the short answer:

This is because of DRY (Don´t Repeat Yourself), think this: what if you need set the same variable in all the templates through all the views?: context_processors, are methods that add variables to your templates in a more ordered way.

I quote:

Django comes with a special Context class, django.template.RequestContext, that acts slightly differently than the normal django.template.Context. The first difference is that it takes an HttpRequest as its first argument. For example:

c = RequestContext(request, {
    'foo': 'bar',
})

The second difference is that it automatically populates the context with a few variables, according to your TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS setting.