Django Templating Language - Part III

We're finally here! We've already seen how to extract stuff from databases. Now let's put that to good use. Before we begin, let me explain two concepts here: Template and Context.
Template is the front end, the looks of the page. This will mean the HTML (+CSS+jQuery+whatever else) code you write.
Context means what you want to put in that page. In the earlier post, we had used the variable {{ name }}. Context will tell Python what value to pass to that variable.

First things first. Let's import the necessary stuff.
from django.template import Template, Context
from django.shortcuts import render
from django.http import HttpResponse

Now what I do is pass HTML code as string to Template make it render it. While this is a neat method, I'm sure there are others out there that I don't know. So please comment so that I'll be able to learn other (maybe more efficient) ways to render templates.
The way to do this would be to use file handling. So, in views.py:

def showName (request):
    f1 = open ("/path/to/file/something.html")
    code = ""
    for i in f1.read ():
        code += i

Hope you understand what I did there. I opened a file called something.html, and returned everything in that file in the form of the code variable.
Now, let's create a template out of that file.

def showName (request):
    f1 = open ("/path/to/file/something.html")
    code = ""
    for i in f1.read ():
        code += i
    t = Template (code)

As I said earlier, I passed file contents in the form of a string to the Template method. We'll consider the same code we used for for and if in the last post (I'm hoping you will add all the other necessities to make it valid HTML code). Now let's pass data to {{ name }} using Context.

def showName (request):
    f1 = open ("/path/to/file/something.html")
    code = ""
    for i in f1.read ():
        code += i
    t = Template (code)
    c = Context ({'name':'tejas'})

As you can see, you have to pass a dictionary as a parameter to the Context method. The keys are the variables used in the templating language, and the values are the values we want them to have. The values can be variables too. But the keys have to be strings.
Finally, let's render the page.

def showName (request):
    f1 = open ("/path/to/file/something.html")
    code = ""
    for i in f1.read ():
        code += i
    t = Template (code)
    c = Context ({'name':'tejas'})
    html = t.render (c)
    return HttpReponse (html)

The second to last statement tells the system to render the context c to the template t. Assign this to a variable and return HttpResponse of this variable.
In the next part, we'll see how to render context with content from databases. Au revoir!