Writing your own template loaders

Django has three builtin template loaders which are used to get the templates for rendering.

TEMPLATE_LOADERS = (
    'django.template.loaders.filesystem.load_template_source',
    'django.template.loaders.app_directories.load_template_source',
#     'django.template.loaders.eggs.load_template_source',
)

Writing your template loader is a awfuly easy. It is a callable which

  1. Returns a tuple of (openfile, filename) if it can find the template.
  2. Raise TemplateDoesNotExist if the templates cannot be found.

The simplest template loader can be

from django.template import TemplateDoesNotExist
def load_template_source(template_name, template_dirs=None):
        try:
            return open(template_name).read(), template_name
        except IOError:
            raise TemplateDoesNotExist, template_name

if you put this to your template loaders directory,

TEMPLATE_LOADERS = (
    'django.template.loaders.filesystem.load_template_source',
    'django.template.loaders.app_directories.load_template_source',
    'dgrid.load_template_source'
#     'django.template.loaders.eggs.load_template_source',

You can do access a template using an absolute path.

In [6]: get_template('/home/shabda/abc.txt')
Out[6]: <django.template.Template object at 0x91c860c>

In [7]: temp = get_template('/home/shabda/abc.txt')

In [8]: temp
Out[8]: <django.template.Template object at 0x9358a0c>

In [9]: temp.render
Out[9]: <bound method Template.render of <django.template.Template object at 0x9358a0c>>

This is the first in the series of short and sweet Django posts we are going to do. You are interested, right. Do follow us on twitter or subscribe to our feed.

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Thank you for reading the Agiliq blog. This article was written by shabda on Nov 21, 2009 in tutorial .

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