Django-Blackhole

Django application that let's you work in your templates apart from having or not the corresponding views created. This is very useful if you (or a member of your project) are working in a template and don't want to get bothered by if the view of your template is not done or is in an incomplete state or you have to be logged in and so on. With this plugin you can easily access the template you want to work on, set context data directly via the url or set context data via fixtures.

Features

• Design your template without having the corresponding view created.
• Pass data to your template via the url.
• Specify a json fixture file in the url with your context data.
• Patch Django's url reverse to avoid those annoying url reverse errors when working solely in a template.

Tutorial

In order to start using this plugin, you need to:

1. Add application to your INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS += ('blackhole',)

2. Include plugin urls in your project urls:

if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += patterns('', ('^_blackhole/', include('blackhole.urls')))

With that in place you should be able to access the url:

/_blackhole/templates/<template name>/?<template data>

Let's say you have the following template:

myapp/
  templates/
     404.html
     myapp/
       hello.jinja

Accessing the template through an url

You can access those templates through the urls:

/_blackhole/templates/404.html

and

/_blackhole/templates/myapp/hello.jinja

Passing data to the templates

If you have a message variable in hello.jinja you can set that variable with:

/_blackhole/templates/myapp/hello.jinja?message=hola

You can also set nested values. Let's say you have the variable person.name in hello.jinja, you can set that variable with:

/_blackhole/templates/myapp/hello.jinja?person.name=john

Passing data to the templates via fixtures

If your template is too complex to set all the data it needs via the url you can use instead a fixture and specify that fixture via the url. Let's say you have:

myapp/
  fixtures/
    myapp_template_data.json
  templates/

If now you access:

/_blackhole/templates/myapp/hello.jinja?_fixture=myapp_template_data

The template context will be updated with the context defined in the fixture. For example, if you have the fixture:

{
  "name": "some name",
  "owner": {
    ...
  }
}

the template context will have the variable name set to some name and the variable owner set to the dictionary associated to the owner key in the fixture.

Visualizing the template in raw format

If you append /raw/ to the url you can see the template in raw format:

/_blackhole/templates/myapp/hello.jinja/raw/

The raw format is just the same response returned with text/plain as the Content-Type.

If you want to receive the response in another Content-Type just set the _mime param. By default the charset is utf-8 but you can also set it via the _charset param:

/_blackhole/templates/myapp/hello.jinja?message=hola&_mime=text/csv&_charset=utf-16

Installation

To install, simply:

$ pip install django-blackhole

Or, directly from the main repository:

$ pip install -e git+https://github.com/ikame/django-blackhole.git#egg=blackhole

See project's website for more information.