Django Support in Jinja 1.2
Jinja 1.2 is about to be released, I just want to switch all the pocoo projects from subversion to mercurial first. One of the new features in Jinja 1.2 is the django support. Thanks to Bryan McLemore from curse for his contributions.
I refactored his code a bit so that it integrates a little nicer into django applications, the original code had some other names for functions and used idioms from curse that feel unnatural in django applications.
Basically to get started in Jinja 1.2 you have to do nothing more than adding the following thing into your urls.py file, right at the beginning:
from jinja.contrib import djangosupport
djangosupport.configure()
That automatically configures Jinja for django and adds a virtual module called “django.contrib.jinja” that contains versions of the django shortcuts that work with Jinja. This module also provides the environment that is automatically set up based on your django configuration.
Basically if you have used in your views this code so far:
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
def foo(req):
return render_to_response("foo.html", context_dict)
The only thing you have to change is the import:
from django.contrib.jinja import render_to_response
Another change is that Jinja users a plain old dictionary instead of a Context instance. So there is no RequestContext. Just pass it a third parameter that points to the request object to get your context processors called.
What the jinja contrib module also provides is a `render_to_string` method that works like render_to_response, but returns a unicode object, a register object that you can use to register filters, objects and tests on the jinja environment. If you want to use some django filters that are not known to Jinja you can use the `convert_django_filter` function that returns a converted filter if you pass it a django one. The Jinja environment instance is available as “env” in that module too.
If you want to try it out right now you can check out the new-parser branch. Information about the usage of the django integration are so far only in the module docstring. Happy testing :-)