Django view - load template from calling app's dir first

Question

I try to keep a somewhat consistent naming scheme on my HTML templates. I.e. index.html for main, delete.html for delete page and so forth. But the app_directories

Answer 1

The app_loader looks for templates within your applications in order that they are specified in your INSTALLED_APPS. (http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/api/#loader-types).

My suggestion is to preface the name of your template file with the app name to avoid these naming conflicts.

For example, the template dir for app1 would look like:

templates/
    app1_index.html
    app1_delete.html
    app1_add.html
    app1_create.html

Answer 2

I know this is an old thread, but I made something reusable, that allows for simpler namespacing. You could load the following as a Template Loader. It will find appname/index.html in appname/templates/index.html.

Gist available here: https://gist.github.com/871567

"""
Wrapper for loading templates from "templates" directories in INSTALLED_APPS
packages, prefixed by the appname for namespacing.

This loader finds `appname/templates/index.html` when looking for something
of the form `appname/index.html`.
"""

from django.template import TemplateDoesNotExist
from django.template.loaders.app_directories import app_template_dirs, Loader as BaseAppLoader

class Loader(BaseAppLoader):
    '''
    Modified AppDirecotry Template Loader that allows namespacing templates
    with the name of their app, without requiring an extra subdirectory
    in the form of `appname/templates/appname`.
    '''
    def load_template_source(self, template_name, template_dirs=None):
        try:
            app_name, template_path = template_name.split('/', 1)
        except ValueError:
            raise TemplateDoesNotExist(template_name)

        if not template_dirs:
            template_dirs = (d for d in app_template_dirs if
                    d.endswith('/%s/templates' % app_name))

        return iter(super(Loader, self).load_template_source(template_path,
                template_dirs))

Answer 3

The reason for this is that the app_directories loader is essentially the same as adding each app's template folder to the TEMPLATE_DIRS setting, e.g. like

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(PROJECT_PATH, 'app1', 'templates'),
    os.path.join(PROJECT_PATH, 'app2', 'template'),
    ...
    os.path.join(PROJECT_PATH, 'templates'),
)

The problem with this is that as you mentioned, the index.html will always be found in app1/templates/index.html instead of any other app. There is no easy solution to magically fix this behavior without modifying the app_directories loader and using introspection or passing along app information, which gets a bit complicated. An easier solution:

• Keep your settings.py as-is
• Add a subdirectory in each app's templates folder with the name of the app
• Use the templates in views like 'app1/index.html' or 'app2/index.html'

For a more concrete example:

project
    app1
        templates
            app1
                index.html
                add.html
                ...
        models.py
        views.py
        ...
    app2
        ...

Then in the views:

def index(request):
    return render_to_response('app1/index.html', locals())

You could even write a wrapper to automate prepending the app name to all your views, and even that could be extended to use introspection, e.g.:

def render(template, data=None):
    return render_to_response(__name__.split(".")[-2] + '/' + template, data)

def index(request):
    return render('index.html', locals())

The _____name_____.split(".")[-2] assumes the file is within a package, so it will turn e.g. 'app1.views' into 'app1' to prepend to the template name. This also assumes a user will never rename your app without also renaming the folder in the templates directory, which may not be a safe assumption to make and in that case just hard-code the name of the folder in the templates directory.