Django - Rendering Inclusion Tag from a View

Question

so I was wondering if you could return an inclusion tag directly from a view.

The page is a normal page with a list of items. The list of items is rendered using an inclusion tag. If an ajax request is made to the view, I want to return only what the inclusion tag would return so I can append it onto the page via javascript. Is something like this possible? Or should I architect this better?

Answer 1

This sounds like a job for the render_to_string or render_to_response shortcuts:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/api/#the-render-to-string-shortcut
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/shortcuts/#django.shortcuts.render_to_response

We can still use the inclusion tag to generate a template context dict from our args (as helpfully pointed out by @BobStein-VisiBone in comments)

from django.template.loader import render_to_string
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response

from .templatetags import my_inclusion_tag


rendered = render_to_string('my_include.html', my_inclusion_tag(foo='bar'))

#or

def my_view(request):
    if request.is_ajax():
        return render_to_response('my_include.html',
                      my_inclusion_tag(foo='bar'),
                      context_instance=RequestContext(request))

Answer 2

quick and dirty way could be to have a view, that renders a template, that only contains your templatetag.