Question

New to Django so could be totally wrong in my methodology.

I have a block of complex HTML that I reuse in several parts of my site, but populated with different data. I want to turn this into a block I can put anywhere.

I read up on inclusion tags and defined it like this:

from django import template
register = template.Library()

@register.inclusion_tag('release_widget.html')
def release_widget(releases):
    return {'release_list': releases}   

Then when I use it in my templates:

{% load release_widget %}
{% release_widget release_list %}

This works. My issue is that inside the release_widget.html file I lose access to my MEDIA_URL variable which defines where to find my image assets. I assume this is because the context isn’t being passed through?

I looked at the takes_context=True parameter but couldn’t figure it out – it looks like this doesn’t take a variable anymore, which doesn’t work for me – I need to be able to pass a different dictionary each time I include the block.

Is there a better way of doing this? Should I even be using MEDIA_URL at all? I can’t just use absolute paths as my site structure is like site.com/article/something/123 and assets are in site.com/assets/ and I don’t want ../ everywhere.

thanks,
Matt

Answer 1

takes_context is the right way to go. I don’t know why you say it doesn’t take a variable: it does, it just takes the context dictionary as an additional (initial) parameter. So the tag looks like this:

@register.inclusion_tag('release_widget.html', takes_context=True)
def release_widget(context, releases):
    return {'MEDIA_URL': context['MEDIA_URL'], 'release_list': releases}