How do I avoid duplicating strings in my Django templates?

Question

I'm wondering how to duplicate a few strings in my templates. Specifically, I'm looking to create a table of contents sort of navigation at the top of my pages with anchor links to content farther down (like http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/faq/ ). I want the links to have the same text as the section headers farther down.

I've thought about using {% with %}, but it seems unwieldy to have to nest everything inside my {% with %} block.

Similar to Whats the best way to duplicate data in a django template? , but I am not inheriting this template anywhere so using {% block %} is not really an option.

Answer 1

This seems like a situation for just using a template variable that you've passed from a view (eg {{ link_name }} ).

You could use also possibly use template inclusion tag that includes another template with your duplicate information.

Answer 2

In your view, you could potentially break your content up so that the headers are individually accessible as template variables. You might store the information associated with each header as a list of dicts:

page_content = [
    { 
         'id':'header1',
         'header': 'Text for Header 1'
         'content' : 'Content Beneath header 1' 
    },
]

Then, in your templates, you could generate your table on contents with something like this:

{% for d in page_content  %}
    <a href="#{{ d.id }}">{{ d.header }}</a>
{% endfor %}

While the content of your page would look something like this:

{% for d in page_content  %}
    <h1 id="#{{ d.id }}">{{ d.header }}</h1><p>{{ d.content }}</p>
{% endfor %}