More About Contexts

The word "context" refers to data that can be used during the rendering of a page.

Default Context

There are two ways to get context into each page. The first is via template comments.

Writing {# title = More About Context #}

at the top of the HTML page will create the variable title that can be used in the page as {{ page.title }} to produce: More About Contexts

To add more variables list them one on each line. To add data beyond a simple string use the JSON format:

{# title = More About Context #}
{# foo = 1234.5 #}
{# bar = [ 100, 200, 'Hello World' ] #}

Note that in the last example for bar gets turned into python list accessible as {{ page.bar }} to produce [100, 200, u'Hello World'].

The {{ page.bar }} object can also be looped over with Django to produce:

• 100

• 200

• Hello World

Advanced Context

The second method of getting context into a page is a python module named context.py placed in the directory root. This may contain any python construct. Make sure that this python module can be executed without errors.

The content of this module will be visible under the parameter data {{ context }} variable name.

Example supposed that the context.py file contains the following:

#
# The data file named context.py in the root folder
# will be loaded automatically into the page.
#

NUMBERS = range(5)

# It may contain any valid python construct.

def say_hello(name):
    return "Hello %s" % name

greeting = say_hello("World!")

This file has to be in the root location of the site. We can now access the contents of this module via context variable like so {{ context.greeting }} will produce: Hello World!

Go back to: Home Page .