django-icanhaz

A templatetag for easier integration of ICanHaz.js JavaScript templates with Django templates.

Quickstart

Dependencies

Tested with Django 1.3 through trunk, and Python 2.6 and 2.7. Almost certainly works with older versions of both.

Installation

Install from PyPI with pip:

pip install django-icanhaz

or get the in-development version:

pip install django-icanhaz==dev

Usage

• Add "icanhaz" to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.
• Set the ICANHAZ_DIRS setting to a list of full (absolute) path to directories where you will store your ICanHaz templates.
• {% load icanhaz %} and use {% icanhaz "templatename" %} in your Django templates to safely embed the ICanHaz.js template at <ICANHAZ_DIRS-entry>/templatename.html into your Django template, automatically wrapped in <script id="templatename" type="text/html">, ready for ich.templatename({...}) in your JavaScript.

django-icanhaz does not bundle ICanHaz.js or provide any JavaScript utilities; it just helps you easily embed the templates in your HTML. Include ICanHaz.js in your project's static assets and use it in your JS as usual.

Advanced usage

You can also bundle ICanHaz templates with Django reusable apps; by default django-icanhaz will look for templates in a jstemplates subdirectory of each app in INSTALLED_APPS. The app subdirectory name(s) to check can be configured via the ICANHAZ_APP_DIRNAMES setting, which defaults to ["jstemplates"].

The finding of templates can be fully controlled via the ICANHAZ_FINDERS setting, which is a list of dotted paths to finder classes. A finder class should be instantiable with no arguments, and have a find(name) method which returns the full absolute path to a template file, given a base-name.

By default, ICANHAZ_FINDERS contains "icanhaz.finders.FilesystemFinder" (which searches directories listed in ICANHAZ_DIRS) and "icanhaz.finders.AppFinder" (which searches subdirectories named in ICANHAZ_APP_DIRNAMES of each app in INSTALLED_APPS), in that order -- thus templates found in ICANHAZ_DIRS take precedence over templates in apps.

Rationale

The collision between Django templates' use of {{ and }} as template variable markers and ICanHaz.js' use of same has spawned a variety of solutions. One solution simply replaces [[ and ]] with {{ and }} inside an icanhaz template tag; another makes a valiant attempt to reconstruct verbatim text within a chunk of a Django template after it has already been mangled by the Django template tokenizer.

I prefer to keep my JavaScript templates in separate files in a dedicated directory anyway, to avoid confusion between server-side and client-side templating. So my contribution to the array of solutions is essentially just an "include" tag that avoids parsing the included file as a Django template (and for convenience, automatically wraps it in the script tag that ICanHaz.js expects to find it in).

Enjoy!