How to compare dates in Django templates

Question

I would like to compare a date to the current date in Django, preferably in the template, but it is also possible to do before rendering the template. If the date has already passed, I want to say "In the past" while if it is in the future, I want to give the date.

I was hoping one could do something like this:

{% if listing.date <= now %} 
     In the past 
{% else %} 
     {{ listing.date|date:"d M Y" }} 
{% endif %}

With now being today's date, but this does not work. I couldn't find anything about this in the Django docs. Can anyone give some advice?

Answer 1

Compare date in the view, and pass something like in_the_past (boolean) to the extra_context.

Or better add it to the model as a property.

from datetime import date

@property
def is_past_due(self):
    return date.today() > self.date

Then in the template:

{% if listing.is_past_due %}
    In the past
{% else %}
    {{ listing.date|date:"d M Y" }}
{% endif %}

Basically the template is not the place for date comparison IMO.

Answer 2

As of Django 1.8 the following slightly distasteful construct does the job:

{% now "Y-m-d" as todays_date %}
{% if todays_date < someday|date:"Y-m-d" %}
   <h1>It's not too late!</h1>
{% endif %}

Hackish, but it avoids the need for a custom tag or context processor.

Answer 3

I added date_now to my list of context processors.

So in the template there's a variable called "date_now" which is just datetime.datetime.now()

Make a context processor called date_now in the file context_processors.py

import datetime

def date_now(request):
    return {'date_now':datetime.datetime.now()}

And in settings.py, modify CONTEXT_PROCESSORS to include it, in my case it's

app_name.context_processors.date_now

Answer 4

addition to @bx2 beneficial answer, if your field is a datetime field just call date() function to models datetimefield:

from datetime import date

@property
def is_past_due(self):
    if date.today() > self.date.date():
        return True
    return False

EDIT: i think this could be shrunken to:

from datetime import date

@property
def is_past_due(self):
    return date.today() > self.date.date()

Answer 5

I believe the easiest way to achieve this is by importing datetime in your views.py and passing today's date as context data.

context['today'] = datetime.date.today()

Then in the template tags you could do something like this.

 {% if listing.date < today % }

This way if you are passing a list of objects as context, you can apply the filter to each line as you output it in the HTML template. I had a list of items that I had filtered out and was using Bootstrap to stylize as I displayed them. I wanted to make overdue dates stand out and applied the filtering only if one of my dates was less than today's date.

Answer 6

You can always pass datetime.datetime.now (since django models use Python's standard datetime object).

Using render_to_response, you could do something like this (after importing datetime):

return render_to_response('template.html', {'now': datetime.datetime.now()})

Now that you have access to "now" inside of the template, you can compare dates just like you did in your examples.

Furthermore, if you use RequestContext in your views - you will be able to add "now" as a context_processor if you need this in multiple files. This will add "now" to any template rendered with a RequestContext.

However, it is more realistic that you simply just get the list of records that are before now in your original queryset and avoid querying for useless data in the first place:

listing.objects.filter(date__lt=datetime.datetime.now())