I have been contemplating switching to Mako templates for my Django projects for quite some time, partly because I found some of the template syntax in Django slightly awkward.

Today, a question about recursion support in Django templates came up on the #Django IRC channel, which made me think for a minute. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of a quick way of accomplishing this in Django, short of using a template tag. However, some examples that I had seen in Mako came to mind, which illustrates the flexibility and power of this templating language.

I decided I would put together some code just to showcase how it could work. The example I chose is to print an organizational chart using the simple Employee class below:

models.py:

class Employee(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=64)
    reports_to = models.ForeignKey('self', related_name='employees')

organizational_chart.html:

<ul>
    ${render_employee(ceo)}
</ul>

<%def name="render_employee(person)">
    <li>${person.name}
    <ul>
    % for employee in person.employees:
         %{render_person(employee)}
    % endfor
    </ul>
    </li>
</%def>

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Django. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.