Re: Directory layout for a large Django application (not project)

On Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 1:13 PM, IgorS wrote:

First of all, thanks a lot to everyone who replied :-)

Tom:

As i mentioned, i am new to Django and could be missing big parts.

Please do not hate me too much for my naivete :-)

The approach you suggested regarding the static files seems to be

reasonable. Especially considering that the static files will

eventually go to a separate server.

But I have some doubts regarding the templates. And the doubts come

exactly from that [explicit vs. implicit] perspective. Why not making

it more explicit? I mean to change it in a way that there is no need

to relay on the order in which Django searches for the templates. The

order is defined at the project level and this unnecessarily couples

my application with the project.

A big reason to keep it the current way, is that typically the project level templates will override app level templates. This let's you create reusable apps and distribute them with default templates, but allow other apps or the project itself to override those templates without having to modify the original app. 

The only two places where the templates are referenced are the views

and other templates (in the "extends" tag). Please correct me if I am

wrong. Making it more explicit in the views is simple. E.g., it can be

done like this:

template = app_settings.path_to_template('base.html')

return render_to_response(template, …)

Here app_settings.py is a settings file that stays in the

application's root folder; and path_to_template is an application-

specific function, which returns absolute path to the template (using

os.path and the name of the app's folder).

Dealing with the templates that reference other templates (in the

"extends" tag) seems a bit trickier... One way that I found is to use

a variable in the "extends" tag. But that will require some code in

the application-specific context processor, which in turn will need to

be specified at the project level in settings.py in

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS.

In that case I can do something like this in the templates:

{% extends <APP>_TEMPLATES.base %}

where base is a key in the <APP>_TEMPLATES dictionary whose value

contains absolute path to the base.html.

This approach seems to be more explicit but also a bit more

complicated and still depends on the settings at the project level (on

the other hand, having an application-level context processor seems to

be almost inevitable). And yes, my solution seems to be somehow half-

baked…

Can this problem with the "extends" tag be solved in a more elegant

way?

Am I digging in a wrong direction? Is it easier to just rely on the

Django's template scanning order and to forget the whole thing?

What do you think?

Thank you,

-igor

Looks pretty good, the only thing I would change would be to prefix

templates and static files with the app name, by placing them inside a

directory named after the app, eg 'app/templates/app/index.html', as

this will avoid conflicts with other templates/static media.

Cheers

Tom

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