willo.gd/en

First post of 2015, doesn't time fly.

So a bit of background; I'm trying more and more to develop using pattern libraries in my projects. Developing independant and encapsulated components makes prototying quicker, and bugs fewer so a big win overall. However I ran into a bit of stumbling block when trying to get Django Templates to play ball with this approach. What I wanted to do was create a template for a component and include this in a base template whenever I wanted to use the component. In itself that's fine - Django has {% include "blah.html" %} which does this nicely; the issue is that for specific components I wanted to override a {% block my_block %} within the included template. Out the box (as far as I can tell) this is only possible when extending ({% extend blah %}) a template. What is possible is to use with e.g.

{% include "my_component.html" with custom_var="hello world" %}

After a bit of playing around I came up with a custom tag that allows the capture of arbitrary html between the start and end tags to be saved to a named context variable. This can then be passed using with to the included template. It allows you to do the following:

base.html

{% blockvar some_html %}
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
{% endblockvar %}

{% include "my_component.html" with list_html=some_html %}

my_component.html

<ul class="my_component">
{{ list_html }}
</ul>

Grab the tag code here. Enjoy!