Django's STATIC_URL and Ajax requests

Question

My web page makes an AJAX call to the server to dynamically select an image for display. The problem I've run into is that the STATIC_URL variable evaluates to an empty string, and so the image fails to load.

This is the code I'm using the render the path to the image.

text = "<img src=\"{{ STATIC_URL }}/images/%s\"> %s" % (ball_file, val)
t = Template(text)
tt = t.render(Context())

Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Why even use Template ? Wouldn't this work ?

from django.conf import settings

text = u'<img src="%simages/%s"> %s' % (settings.STATIC_URL, ball_file, val)

Note that STATIC_URL should contain the trailing slash, hence %simages in this example instead of %s/images .

Answer 2

You haven't supplied any context for that template, so naturally all variables including STATIC_URL will resolve to empty. If you use a RequestContext, then the context processors will be run first, and therefore extra items like the static URL (and the user, and various other things) will be available.

However I agree with jpic, you'd be better off doing this directly in Python.