Django passing variables to templates from class based views

Question

If I have a class based view, like this,

class SomeView (View):
    response_template='some_template.html'
    var1 = 0
    var2 = 1

    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        return render_to_response(self.response_template, locals(), context_instance=RequestContext(request))

My question is, inside the template some_template.html, how do I access var1 and var2? As far as I understood this, the locals() sort of just dumps all the local variables into the template, which has worked very well so far. But these other variables aren't technically "local", they're part of a class, so how do I pass them over??

Thanks!

Answer 1

A cleaner way of doing this could be to replicate Django's Template view:

class TemplateView(TemplateResponseMixin, ContextMixin, View):
    """
    A view that renders a template.  This view will also pass into the context
    any keyword arguments passed by the url conf.
    """
    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        context = self.get_context_data(**kwargs)
        return self.render_to_response(context)

and then adding it to the get_context_data function. Or you could simply use the TemplateView which will allow you to specify a template name and then you could override the get_context_data function:

class SomeView(generic.TemplateView):
    var1 = 0
    var2 = 1 
    template_name = 'some_template.html'

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        context = super(SomeView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs)
        context.update({'var1': self.var1, 'var2': self.var2})
        return context

EDIT

Django has generic views which you can use for a variety of things, I would strongly advise you to go look at the docs for a full list of them, These generic views have functions you can override to do custom things which aren't supported by default. In your case you just wanted a template with context variables on them which means you subclass the TemplateView and supply the template_name and then finally you can override the get_context_data function to add your context data and that would be all there is to it, the second piece of code would be all you need in your case.