Question

The scenario goes like this.

I get an atom file from a website (say A). A third party will be request this atom file through my website (say B).

I am writing a Django app which will frequently poll website A and store it as a file. Now, when a third party requests for the file through website B, I will have to display the file as xml in the browser.

My question is how do I render an entire xml file to a view in Django?

 render_to_response

expects a template. I can’t use a template as such. I just need to display the file in the view. How do I do this?

Answer 1

If you don’t want to render a template, don’t do so. render is just a shortcut to render a template. If you just want to display text, just pass it into the HttpResponse.

Since your data is in a file, this will work:

return HttpResponse(open('myxmlfile.xml').read())

although you should beware of concurrency issues, if more than one person is accessing your site at a time.