Introduction

Often, when you use a client-side javascript framework (e.g. backbone/ember/angular/wathever), you'll want small templates to render your page. The problem starts when:

• you still want to be able to use django template engine
• and you want a cool place to define your small templates.

Those are the 2 issues that this django app tries to address. It also comes with helper functionalities for those kind of templates, like the verbatim templatetags from django 1.5 dev code that allows you to define a zone where django won't interpret anything to avoid conflicts with template languages like mustache.js.

With it, you define all your small templates in the same directory and you'll be able to access them in the fragments javascript object that contains the (rendered by django) templates.

Installation

From pip:

pip install django-template-fragments

From setup.py:

git clone git://github.com/Psycojoker/django-template-fragments.git
cd django-template-fragments
python setup.py install

Create a dir where you want to store your fragments, then add FRAGMENTS_DIR to your settings.py, it must be an absolute path.

I like to define my FRAGMENTS_DIR like this:

import os
PROJECT_PATH = os.path.abspath(os.path.split(__file__)[0])
SUBPROJECT_PATH = os.path.split(PROJECT_PATH)[0]

FRAGMENTS_DIR = os.path.join(SUBPROJECT_PATH, "fragments")

This will set it to the directory project_name/fragments (where your settings.py is in project_name/project_name/settings.py).

Next, write some small html snippets in this dir.

Then add something like this to your urls.py

url(r'^', include('fragments.urls')),

And somewhere in your base template

<script type="text/javascript" src="{% url fragments %}" />

This will give you a javascript object fragments containing all your fragments, the key is the filename of the fragment without the extension.

Example: object_list.html will be accessible in the fragments object like this: fragments.object_list

If you put the fragment in a subdir in the FRAGMENTS_DIR, the key will be the filename without its extension joined with the subdir path where the / are replaced by _.

Not clear? Here is an example: the file FRAGMENTS_DIR/one/two/three.html will be accessible at the key one_two_three.

HamlPy support

If you have HamlPy installed and that your fragment name ends with .haml, django-template-fragments will take it into account and use HamlPy to generate the html.

Verbatim tag

You have to put fragments in your installed apps in settings.py for this to work.

I've taken code from the dev branch of django 1.5 to allow the use of the verbatim templatetags to avoid conflicts between django template syntax and other template engine syntax (e.g. mustache).

Example:

{% load fragments %}

{{ will_be_interpreted }}
{% verbatim %}
{{ wont_be_interpredted }}
{% endverbatim %}

You can also choose a specific closing tag as described in django documentation.

Example from the doc:

{% load fragments %}

{% verbatim myblock %}
    Avoid template rendering via the {% verbatim %}{% endverbatim %} block.
{% endverbatim myblock %}

Ignored files extensions

By default django-template-fragments ignores every files that ends with one of those: .pyc .swo .swp ~

You can specify your own list by defining FRAGMENTS_IGNORED_FILE_TYPES in your settings.py.