How can I send data to a base template in Django?

Question

Let's say I have a django site, and a base template for all pages with a footer that I want to display a list of the top 5 products on my site. How would I go about sending that list to the base template to render? Does every view need to send that data to the render_to_response? Should I use a template_tag? How would you do it?

Answer 1

You should use a custom context processor. With this you can set a variable e.g. top_products that will be available in all your templates.

E.g.

# in project/app/context_processors.py
from app.models import Product

def top_products(request):
    return {'top_products': Products.objects.all()} # of course some filter here

In your settings.py:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    # maybe other here
    'app.context_processors.top_products',
)

And in your template:

{% for product in top_products %}
    ...