Question

Still learning django and python…

I have a form with many fields. I want to lay them out in rows of two fields each, and am using a table to do so. I can’t simply iterate over all the fields as I want finer control on certain things.

Essentially, I am putting out a row of two fields, and then if there are errors in any of those fields, generate a second row containing the errors.

In the template, I am repeating the following pattern over and over again:

 <tr>
     <td class="labels">Order Number:</td><td class="textentry">{{ order.ordernum }}</td>
     <td class="labels">Order Status:</td><td class="textentry">{{ order.status }} </td>
 </tr>
     {% if order.ordernum.errors %}
        {% for error in order.ordernum.errors %}
            <tr class="errors"><td colspan=2> {{ error|escape }}</td>
        {% endfor %}
        {% if order.status.errors %}
           {% for error in order.status.errors %}
              <td colspan=2> {{ error|escape }}</td>
           {% endfor %}
        {% endif %}
        </tr>
     {% endif %}

where all that changes from repeated pattern to repeated pattern are the specific field names.

The repetition makes me wonder: is there a better way to do this in the template? Is there some way to call a function from within the template where I could just pass in the field names?

Thanks for your help!

W.

Answer 1

For anyone interested, I don’t know if there’s a better solution, but template macros a la djangosnippets.org/snippets/363 is how I solved this problem.