Django snippets: Smart {% if %} template tag

http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/1350/

by jacquesm • 17 years ago

25 13 17 years ago

apgwoz• 17 years ago

This is good. Of course, this is how the if tag should work in django to begin with.

jacquesm5• 17 years ago

agreed. The 'crippling' has gone a bit too far I think, I can see the reason why they want to limit what you can do within a template but to not have the ability to combine expressions gets tedious really quickly.

The argument seems to be that a template designer should not be able to break the site, that's not a very strong one because after all any brace or % sign removed will break the site just fine.

yummyfajitas• 17 years ago

I'm not entirely sure how

    {% if a == b %}

will break the site, but

    {% ifequal a b %}

will not. Maybe if someone destructively overloads __eq__?

vesp• 17 years ago

Agree. Seriously, don't know what they're waiting to commit this to the trunk. IMHO the template system in Django is too restricted and should get some steroids, despite the designer point of keeping it simple. I think you can get the best from both worlds.

jacquesm5• 17 years ago

I think part of the resistance here is that rolling this in to trunk would be an admission they got it wrong in the first place.

There is a lot of psychology behind the scenes in open source projects.

In big companies this can express itself as NIH and other symptoms like that, in open source projects it usually means that sooner or later somebody admits they were wrong in the past or that a project will fork or that there will be 'unofficial' patches.

The python absence of a 'switch' statement is another nice example of such an issue.

DocSavage• 17 years ago

I wound up ditching Django templates for Jinja 2 in my app engine sites. No regrets. There was just enough irritation with Django templating issues (e.g., the if implementation, filter arguments) that I swapped in Jinja. This article has been posted before but I figure it's pertinent to the OP:

http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2008/9/16/why-jinja-is-not-django-an...

Django snippets: Smart {% if %} template tag

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