django-templateselector

author

Keryn Knight

version

0.2.5

Release	Status
stable (0.2.5)
master

Sections

What it does

Provides a new model field, fields.TemplateField which allows for selection of a specific Django template using a nice form field (fields.TemplateChoiceField) and a nicer widget (widgets.TemplateSelector) than the standard <select> dropdown.

Example

Below is a screenshot of the admin widget, without any thumbnails set up for each template, because I'm too lazy for that.

Use case

Imagine you have a Page model, and you want to allow admins or page authors to choose from a range of templates for the page to use, you could do this:

from django.db import models
from templateselector.fields import TemplateField

class MyPage(models.Model):
  title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
  # ...
  template = TemplateField(match='^myapp/mypage/layouts/.+\.html$')

which would allow them to select any HTML file Django could find in the appropriate directory.

Available functionality

These fields are really the only public API. There's obviously other stuff, if you care to rummage around.

TemplateField

Extends CharField, and requires a match argument which ought to be a string version of a regular expression. The match will be used to filter the possible choices. Optionally also takes a display_name argument, which is a callable (or dotted.string.path.to.one) that takes a given string (the selected template path) and returns a nice name for it. The nice name is available as get_<fieldname>_display, for consistency with Django

The default form field for TemplateField is ...

TemplateChoiceField

Has the same arguments as TemplateField, and can be used independently in all forms if you want to not use the model field. The form field, when rendered with the TemplateSelector widget, will try and show a preview image for each template, by attempting to load a 100W x 120H image from your staticfiles. Given a template name of path/to/template.htm it will try and load path/to/template.htm.png prefixed by whatever your STATIC_URL is. If no file exists, a placeholder image is shown as a fallback.

Both this and the TemplateField make use of...

nice_display_name

This function is the default callable for the display_name arguments on the TemplateField and TemplateChoiceField, it tries to provide some flexibility and sensisble defaults; specifically:

• If your project defines a TEMPLATESELECTOR_DISPLAY_NAMES setting which is a dictionary like {'path/to/template.html': "my awesome template"} then the name "my awesome template" will be shown by preference.
• If not set, or no key match is found, the function will take the file name (not the path!) without any extension and will attempt to make a pretty, readable name of it by replacing most non-alphabet characters with spaces, so the template test/app/hello_world.html would become Hello world

Supported Django versions

The tests are run against Django 1.11 on Python 2.7, and 3.5. The widget uses the Django 1.11 template-based-rendering, so won't work on previous versions. Possibly it'll just default back to a normal radiobox? I dunno.

Installation and usage

Installation

You can use pip to install the 0.2.5 version from PyPI:

pip install django-templateselector==0.2.5

Or you can grab it from GitHub like this:

pip install -e git+https://github.com/kezabelle/django-template-selector.git#egg=django-template-selector

Configuration

To get the TemplateSelector widget to display correctly, you will need to add templateselector to your project's INSTALLED_APPS.

You may also wish to configure TEMPLATESELECTOR_DISPLAY_NAMES = {} to provide nice names (see nice_display_name)

Usage

For using the TemplateField, try something like this:

from django.db.models import Model
from templateselector.fields import TemplateField

class MyPage(models.Model):
  template = TemplateField(match='^myapp/mypage/layouts/.+\.html$')

For using the TemplateChoiceField without using the Model field, you'd do something like:

from django.forms import Form
from templateselector.fields import TemplateChoiceField

class MyForm(Form):
    field = TemplateChoiceField(match="^myapp/[0-9]+.html$")

To get the widget's CSS, don't forget to use {{ form.media }} in your template!

Altering the widget choice size

If you'd like to modify the dimensions used for each option in the widget (eg: you have landscape template thumbnails instead of portrait) you'll need to override the following CSS classes:

.templateselector-list-item {
    width: ???;
}
.templateselector-label input {
    top: ???;
}
.templateselector-thumb {
    width: ???;
    height: ???;
}

You can probably use the #id_FIELDNAME for a given field to provide the necessary specificity.

You may need to provide a wrapper element if you re-use the same model/form attribute name (eg: {{ myform.selected_file }}) for multiple things with different dimensions:

<!-- target with
.myform-wrapper #id_selected_file .templateselector-list-item
etc -->
<div class="myform-wrapper">{{ myform.selected_file }}</div>

<!-- target with
.myapp-wrapper #id_selected_file .templateselector-thumb
 etc -->
<div class="myapp-wrapper">{{ mymodelform.selected_file }}</div>

Running the tests

If you have a cloned copy, you can do:

python setup.py test

If you have tox, you can just do:

tox

Running the demo

A barebones demo is provided. It assumes you're using something like virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper but you can probably figure it out otherwise:

mktmpenv --python=`which python3`
pip install -e git+https://github.com/kezabelle/django-template-selector.git#egg=django-templateselector

Then probably:

cd src/django-templateselector
python demo_project.py runserver

The index page / will show you a normal version of the selection widget, while /admin/tests/mymodel/add/ will show the slightly customised version for the standard Django admin.

The license

It's the FreeBSD. There's should be a LICENSE file in the root of the repository, and in any archives.