Best practices for dynamic navigation in django?

Question

My primary navigation consists of news categories, which belong to the Category model. I hardcoded the nav in templates/base.html but want to make it dynamic...

Is it a bad idea to embed model code in my template? If so how should I pull them? Should I make the nav file separate? And not only will I just rely on the categories, but I also will need a 'home' link, and some other links as well.

If possible it would be great if I could make a new Navigation model but I'm not sure how I would be able to include news categories from the category table so they could also be items in the nav.

Answer 1

Why not create in inclusion tag where you shepherd together all your relevant categories data/links, make them into a list, then pass that to the inclusion tag's mini template to be rendered in whatever page you wish?

eg, something like this (bearing in mind I have no idea what your current page/content looks like)

@register.inclusion_tag('/path/to/templates/my_nav_inclusion_tag.html')
def my_nav_inclusion_tag()
  #create your base link and add it to the list of links
  links = [['Home', '/']]

  for all the categories you want to add: 
  # (It's up to you to decide how to wrangle your categories into shape)
    links.append([category_name, category_url])

  return {'links':links}

In the inclusion tag template (my_nav_inclusion_tag.html), try something like:

{% for link in links %}
   <a href="{{link.1}}">{{link.0}}</a> 
{% endfor %}

And in whatever templates you need to show the nav in, simply call the inclusion tag, eg:

{% my_nav_inclusion_tag %}

Answer 2

To answer your question, yes it's bad to embed model code in your template. The django way of making your pre-processed navigation information available to every template (including base.html) is via a RequestContext.

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.1/ref/templates/api/#id1

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.1/ref/settings/#setting-TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS