How to pass data to a template without passing it through the view?-CodePudding

I have a base.html file where on the sidebar it loops through all the spaces inside of my Spaces model and displays them as links. I am wondering instead of passing these spaces through each view is there a way to just have them in the base template? I tried looking it up an came across template tags but I don't think those are what I am looking for.

Base.html

<div class="sidenav">
    <h2>Spaces:</h2>
    {% for space in spaces %}
    
    <a href="/{{space}}">{{space}}</a>

    {% endfor %}
</div>

Right now I am passing 'spaces' through my views but I don't want to have to do that in each view i create.

Any help would be appreciated!

CodePudding user response：

To have some variable global to all templates, Django provide context processor. A context processor is a Python function that takes the request object as an argument and returns a dictionary that gets added to the request context.

You can add the spaces objects in the context processor like this :

app_name/context_processors.py

from .app_name import Space

def spaces(request):
    # It must return a dictionary don't forget
    return {'spaces': Space.objects.all()}

In your context processor, you instantiate the space using the request object and make it available for the templates as a variable named spaces.

settings.py

And next, you need to add this custom context processor in the TEMPLATES variable in settings.py like this :

TEMPLATES = [
     {
         # ...
         'OPTIONS': {
                'context_processors': [
                'django.template.context_processors.debug',
                'django.template.context_processors.request',
                'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
                'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',

                # Customs
                'app_name.context_processors.space',
                ],
     },
]

template.html Now you have access of spaces variable on all templates of the project.

<div class="sidenav">
    <h2>Spaces:</h2>

    <!-- spaces variable is in all templates -->
    {% for space in spaces %}

        <a href="/{{space}}">{{space}}</a>

   {% endfor %}
</div>