On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 00:19 -0700, JFQueralt wrote:
> Hi, James.
>
> Does that imply I can use Pythong´s XML manipulation libraries in
> Django blocks?
>
> There has to be a way to retrieve information fron a file in Django (I
> ´ve seen official docs on it).
> XML is nothing than a structured data file so there should be a way to
> retrieve a value and use it in a template.
I think you're missing something here. Planning to do complex data
manipulation in templates is almost always the wrong place. The view
functions -- the pure Python code -- is where your data manipulations
take place and templates are just a way of specifying how the objects
passed to them are converted to strings (since the result of rendering a
template is a string).
There are limited ways to convert any Python object into a string in a
template. In decreasing order of complexity, they are:
1) Pass it to a template tag.
2) Pass the object through a template filter
3) Call a method on the object that takes no arguments
4) Look up an attribute or dictionary key on the object.
5) Call the objects __unicode__ or __str__ method (this is
essentially a special case of point 3, but it's what happens
automatically when you put "{{ some_var }}" into a template).
So there's not really a question of passing "an XML file" to a template
and then working with it in the template. You only pass Python objects
of some variety to templates. Instead, work with the XML file in the
view (using Python's existing XML libraries, as James and Russell have
mentioned) and convert it to one or more Python objects that can then be
rendered in the templates using the one of the above options.
You could write a template tag that took a Python file object or a
variable containing the name of the file and then used the Python code
behind the template tag to read in the file and do whatever you want
with it. In some circumstances, that might be a useful idiom. However,
if you're just starting out with Django, it will no doubt be easier to
start by doing the initial processing entirely in the view, so that you
only have to look at options 3, 4 and 5 above. Then, after you are
comfortable with that (and right now you seem to have some confusion
about what "Django" means in terms of what it does for you), you might
be able to abstract out somethings into template tags if that makes
things easier (it's not necessarily a given that it will make things
easier, either).
Regards,
Malcolm
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