Pyramid/Pylons Framework - opinion on how am I using 'helpers' to accomplish certain tasks

Question

In pyramid, I have created a 'helpers' functionality similar to that in pylons.

one particular function in my helpers.py file is like this:

from pyramid.renderers import render_to_response

def createBlog():
    ## lots of code here ##
    return render_to_response('blog.mako', {'xyz':xyz})

And then in my other applications I can import helpers and do something like the following in my templates:

${h.createBlog()}

which creates a blog on my page. But I am just wondering is this a good way of using helpers to create "module" style plugins that I can easily use anywhere in my projects. Or are there any flaws to this technique which I haven't really thought of yet?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It really depends on how much stuff you want to expose globally. Obviously anything you put into h is available throughout the application, whereas you could return the createBlog function just in the views you want it to be in. One little-known tidbit is that if you use class-based views, the actual class instance is available in the view as the view global variable. For example:

class Foo(object):
    def __init__(self, request):
        self.request = request

    def createBlog(self):
        return render('blog.mako'. {})

    @view_config(...)
    def myview(self):
        return {}

Now in your template you can call render your blog using ${view.createBlog()}.