I'm a django beginner so I'm trying to understand the concept of context and context processor.
I'll apreciate a lot your response. Thanks in advance!
When you use a Django Template, it is compiled once (and only once) and stored for future use, as an optimization. A template can have variable names in double curly braces, such as
{{ myvar1 }}
and {{ myvar2 }}
.
A Context is a dictionary with variable names as the key and their values as the value. Hence, if your context for the above template looks like: {myvar1: 101, myvar2: 102}
, when you pass this context to the template render method, {{ myvar1 }}
would be replaced with 101
and {{ myvar2 }}
with 102
in your template. This is a simplistic example, but really a Context object is the context in which the template is being rendered.
As for a ContextProcessor, that is a slightly advanced concept. You can have in your settings.py
file listed a few Context Processors which take in an HttpRequest
object and return a dictionary (similar to the Context object above). The dictionary (context) returned by the Context Processor is merged into the context passed in by you (the user) by Django.
A use case for a Context Processor is when you always want to insert certain variables inside your template (for example the location of the user could be a candidate). Instead of writing code to insert it in each view, you could simply write a context processor for it and add it to the TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS
settings in settings.py
.
Hope this makes sense. Thanks for taking the class!