Is there a way to have something execute for every view in django?

Question

I'm new to Django and coming from Rails, so that may explain my odd questions below:

I have a main layout that has a sidebar that lists the latest updates to the site. That main layout is used for every page in my webapp so every template that is created extends main.html.

For the latest updates section, I just want to get the last 5 updates from posts to the web app every time a page is rendered. I thought about making the sidebar do this through an ajax call once the page is loaded, but I thought this may not be my best option.

I also considered creating a tag to do this for me and then just calling the tag inside of main.html. This is simple enough, but I'd have to write a lot of HTML inside of the tag code, which seems to be a little annoying (a lot of string appending and such, unless I'm wrong and there is a better way?)

I have read about Context Processors . This seemed to be exactly what I wanted, but it appears this may cause another issue where I have to pass a context_instance to every single render_to_response? This appears to be a lot of code repeat and I'm trying to avoid that if possible. Is there a way to just make render_to_response always take the RequestContext object without always having to specify it?

Are there any other ways to achieve having some code run for every view and eliminate the need to always pass data to a view?

Answer 1

Django 1.3添加了与render_to_response相同的render快捷方式，但自动使用了RequestContext 。

Answer 2

Templates is a appropriate place for this: the variant with custom tag and template inheritance is simple and convenient. To avoid string appending use mini-template just for your tag: it is called inclusion tags .

Answer 3

我肯定会进行Ajax调用，就像创建一个小视图一样简单，该视图查询模型中的5条最新帖子，将它们序列化为json或xml数据，然后将它们返回到HttpRequest对象中。

Answer 4

您可以使用direct_to_template而不是render_to_response 。