Variables in Django Templates

Variables in Django Templates

Variables in Django Templates look like this: {{ variable }}. When the Django template engine encounters a variable, it replaces that variable with the same variable passed in the template engine.

A Variable name must contain the following:-

• Any alphabetical letter (a-Z)
• Any digit (0-9)
• An underscore or a dot (but they must not start with a dot or underscore).

A dot in a variable name has a special meaning during template rendering. It signifies a lookup. Specifically, when the template engine encounters a dot in a variable name, it looks for the following lookups, in this order:

• Dictionary lookup. Example: foo["bar"]
• Attribute lookup. Example: foo.bar
• List-index lookup. Example: foo[bar]

The Template below has two variables {{ first_name }} and {{ brand_name }} with a context of { ‘first_name’: ‘Naman’, ‘brand_name’: ‘Coding Ninjas Studio’ }.

My name is {{ first_name }}, and I am learning from {{ brand_name }}. 

The above template will render to:

Explanation

In this section, we will learn how to create a Variable and use it in our Django project. For explanation, we will consider a project named Coding Ninjas Studio having an app called app.

Refer to Basics of Django Framework to learn how to create a Django project.

Firstly we will create a Django template using variables and basic HTML in app / template.html. This template.html file will be used to render our result in the browser.

My name is {{ first_name }} 
<br>
and I am learning from {{ brand_name }}.

After creating the template, we need to create a view to pass our context dictionary to template.html. We will create the view at app/view.py,

# Import render
from Django.shortcuts import render
 
# create function
def app_view(request):
    # Create dictionary
    context = {
        "first_name" : "Naman",
        "brand_name"  : "Coding Ninjas Studio",
    }
    # Return response
    return render(request, "template.html", context)

You can also try this code with Online Python Compiler

Run Code

After creating the view and template for the Django project, we need to create a url path to map the view created earlier. We will create the url path in a new file app/url.py,

# Import urls from Django
from Django.urls import path
 
# importing views from view.py
from .view import app_view
 
urlpatterns = [
    path('', app_view),
]

You can also try this code with Online Python Compiler

Run Code

Now, let's test our application in the browser and see that everything works successfully.

Hooray, we have successfully created our Django Template and used the variables in Django Templates to display our result in the browser by creating a new Django project.
 

(Source: Giphy)

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What happens when a variable is not a string? 
   In Django, if the variable is not a string the __str__ method will be used by Django to display the variable; and with the same principle, we can access an object attribute just like we do it in Python.
    
2. What is the Django Template?
   A Django template is a python string or a text document marked up using the Django template language. It uses its syntax to deal with tags, variables, filters, etc. 

Key Takeaways  

This article taught us how to create Variables in Django Template and use it with the context in the view model file. We also learned about the naming convention of variables in Django Templates.

Don't stop here. Check out the blogs Best Django Books, Top 30 Basic Django Interview Questions: Part 1, and Top 30 Intermediate Django Interview Questions: Part 2.

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