The inability to assign variables is an intentional design decision; one of
Django's core tenets is that business logic and presentational logic should
be separated. The template language was crafted to provide non-programmers
(front-end developers and designers) the ability to work directly on
templates without having to touch the business logic. Though there are use
cases where defining variables would be helpful, it's a good flag that
you're approaching the problem the wrong way.
Additionally, you can call functions that take arguments, it just takes a
slightly different form than you might expect: custom template tags [2].
This allows you to extend the functionality of the template language while
still maintaining the separation of business and presentational logic.
An interesting historical example of the above two paragraphs: the smart {%
if %} tag [1], which was borne of the lack of an ability to use complex
logic in Django templates.
And the important footnote: I don't mean to stifle your suggestion; quite
the opposite, actually! As Jacob has admitted [3], there is an occasional
need in the Django for designers to tell the programmers to STFU. To extend
the previous example: the smart {% if %} tag was originally shot down but
was ultimately implemented in core [4].
[1] http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/1350/
[2]
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/custom-template-tags/#passing-template-variables-to-the-tag
[3]
http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thread/thread/18bca037f10769e9/cfd908f97b44e324?lnk=gst#cfd908f97b44e324
[4] http://code.djangoproject.com/changeset/11806
On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 7:36 AM, Tom Evans <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Most PHP templating languages allow you to do things that are by
> design not in django's templating, for example in Smarty, one can
> assign new variables on the fly in the template, and even do crazy
> stuff like call functions that take arguments.
>
> Whether that is 'better' or not is a point of view - as you've a
> commit bit, and patches for this sort of stuff in django are rejected,
> I'd guess you are of the view that it is not ;)
>
> Cheers
>
> Tom
>
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