Django templates and variable attributes

Question

I'm using Google App Engine and Django templates.
I have a table that I want to display the objects look something like:

Object Result:     Items = [item1,item2]     Users = [{name='username',item1=3,item2=4},..] 

The Django template is:

<table> <tr align="center">     <th>user</th>     {% for item in result.items %}         <th>{{item}}</th>     {% endfor %} </tr>  {% for user in result.users %}     <tr align="center">          <td>{{user.name}}</td>         {% for item in result.items %}             <td>{{ user.item }}</td>         {% endfor %}     </tr> {% endfor %} </table> 

Now the Django documention states that when it sees a . in variables
It tries several things to get the data, one of which is dictionary lookup which is exactly what I want but doesn't seem to happen...

Answer 1

I found a "nicer"/"better" solution for getting variables inside Its not the nicest way, but it works.

You install a custom filter into django which gets the key of your dict as a parameter

To make it work in google app-engine you need to add a file to your main directory, I called mine django_hack.py which contains this little piece of code

from google.appengine.ext import webapp  register = webapp.template.create_template_register()  def hash(h,key):     if key in h:         return h[key]     else:         return None  register.filter(hash) 

Now that we have this file, all we need to do is tell the app-engine to use it... we do that by adding this little line to your main file

webapp.template.register_template_library('django_hack') 

and in your template view add this template instead of the usual code

{{ user|hash:item }} 

And its should work perfectly =)

Answer 2

I'm assuming that the part the doesn't work is {{ user.item }}.

Django will be trying a dictionary lookup, but using the string "item" and not the value of the item loop variable. Django did the same thing when it resolved {{ user.name }} to the name attribute of the user object, rather than looking for a variable called name.

I think you will need to do some preprocessing of the data in your view before you render it in your template.