Is it possible to give external URLs names in djan

Question

I have just started naming my URL patterns in Django, so that if I want to change the URL pattern, I just have to change it in one place. e.g:

url(r'^$', HomeListView.as_view(), name='home'),

And referencing it in my templates like this:

{% url home %}

Is this possible with external links in case they change or I change the a Facebook page link for example. How would this look?

Thanks

Answer 1

If its external links, and possibility of the change then you should define it in settings or separate static url file and pass those variable with request context.

urls.py should be recommended to use only for your app specific urls.

In this SO thread you can see how to approach defining constant

Answer 2

One way to do this could be to write an external_url template tag, and have an ExternalURL model that stores them.

This would give you the advantage of being able to have the urls editable without redeploying changed code.

The disadvantage is that there will be database lookups to see those urls. Also, you would need to {% load external_urls %} in templates you want to use it in.

# models.py pseudo-code

class ExternalURL(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(unique=True)
    url = models.URLField()

Your template tag might look something like:

# app/templatetags/external_url.py

@library.register()
def external_url(name):
    try:
        return ExternalURL.objects.get(name=name).url
    except ExternalURL.DoesNotExist:
        return ''

Another alternative could be to have a Context Processor that stores them all in the context, allowing you to not have to pass them explicitly into views: would be useful if you had several external urls that were used in many places within your system.

def external_urls(request):
    return {
        'google': 'http://www.google.com/',
        # more here
    }

The advantages of this is no database lookup, no requirement to load the template tag, but you will need to add it to your settings.CONTEXT_PROCESSORS. Also, you could inspect request to see if the current user may see all the urls.