How do I access unrelated models within a Django template?

Question

I want to use an app to create a menu that is easy to edit with the admin interface. Something like this:

class Menu_item
        name = models.CharField()
        item_url = models.URLField()

My template looks something like this:

{% extends base.html %}

div ID="nav"

   {{ foo.navbar.? }}

/div

div ID="Content"

   {% block content %}{% endblock %}

/div

I want div#nav to contain a ul based upon the above model but just can't figure out how to accomplish this. It seems like an object_list generic view would be great but, the URL accesses the view for the model that populates div#content. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there a way to access a generic view without a URL?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I have discovered a solution. Inclusion Tags.

What I did was create an inclusion tag, which amounts to a simple custom template tag (django provides a shortcut for you!).

Here is what I did:

Ignore views.py - It will not be used in this case

Create a sub-directory in the app's dir called "templatetags" containing init.py and get_navbar.py (or whatever you want your tag to be):

mysite/
   navbar/
        templatetags/
            __ init__.py (without the space befire init)
            get_navbar.py

I changed my navbar.models to look like this:

from django.db import models


class Menu_choice(models.Model):
        name = models.CharField(max_length=30)

        def __unicode__(self):
                return self.name

class Menu_item(models.Model):
        name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
        navbar = models.ForeignKey(Menu_choice)
        item_url = models.CharField(max_length=200)
        item_desc = models.CharField(max_length=30)

        def __unicode__(self):
                return self.name

This allows me to create a Menu_choice object in the admin interface for each layer of navigation (primary, secondary, etc)

get_navbar.py looks like this:

from navbar.models import Menu_choice, Menu_item
from django import template

register = template.Library()

@register.inclusion_tag('navbar/navbar.html')
def get_navbar(navBar):
        navbar = Menu_item.objects.filter(navbar__name=navBar)
        return { "navbar": navbar }

(Note navBar as opposed to navbar)

Create the navbar.html template:

    <ul>

    {% for menu_item in navbar %}
        <li><a href="{{ menu_item.item_url }}">{{ menu_item.name }}&lt/a>&lt/li>
    {% endfor  %}
    </ul> 

Finally, I inserted the following into my base.html:

{% load get_navbar %}

And where I want primary navigation:

{% get_navbar "primary" %}

Note: the quotes around the string you are sending to your inclusion tag are important. I spent a ridiculously lengthy bit of time trying to make it work before I figured that out.

Also a big thank you to dikamilo for the help.

Answer 2

First, in you view, get data from db:

def index(request):
    navbar = Menu_item.objects.all()
    return render_to_response( 'you_template.html', 
        { 'navbar': navbar }, context_instance = RequestContext (request ) )

And in template:

<div id="nav">
    <ul>
    {% for i in navbar %}
        <li><a href="{{ i.item_url }}">{{ i.name }}</a></li>
    {% endfor  %}
    </ul>
</div>