creating my own context processor in django

Question

I have come to a point where I need to pass certain variables to all of my views (mostly custom authentication type variables).

I was told writing my own context processor was the best way to do this, but I am having some issues.

My settings file looks like this

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    "django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth",
    "django.core.context_processors.debug",
    "django.core.context_processors.i18n",
    "django.core.context_processors.media",
    "django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages",
    "sandbox.context_processors.say_hello", 
)

As you can see, I have a module called 'context_processors' and a function within that called 'say_hello'.

Which looks like

def say_hello(request):
        return {
            'say_hello':"Hello",
        }

Am I right to assume I can now do the following within my views?

{{ say_hello }}

Right now, this renders to nothing in my template.

My view looks like

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response

def test(request):
        return render_to_response("test.html")

Answer 1

The context processor you have written should work. The problem is in your view.

Are you positive that your view is being rendered with RequestContext?

For example:

def test_view(request):
    return render_to_response('template.html')

The view above will not use the context processors listed in TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS. Make sure you are supplying a RequestContext like so:

def test_view(request):
    return render_to_response('template.html', context_instance=RequestContext(request))