[Solved]-Django Templates: Comparing current url with {% url xyz %}

by

20👍

✅

Since you’ll probably only need to do this once–in your nav template–it makes more sense to me to keep everything in one place.

First reverse your url names and store them in variables like Timmy suggested, then simply compare them in the template:

{% url 'about_page' as about %}
...

<ul id="nav">
    <li class="{% ifequal request.path about %}active{% endifequal %}"><a href="{{about}}">About</a></li>
...

Just make sure you have your request context processor enabled so you have access to the request in the template. Do this by adding django.core.context_processors.debug in your TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS settings variable.

👤nullability

6👍

This is quite a common requirement so it might be worthwhile writing your own template tag to perform this:

class isCurrentNode(template.Node):
    def __init__(self, patterns):
        self.patterns = patterns
    def render(self, context):
        path = context['request'].path
        for pattern in self.patterns:
            curr_pattern = template.Variable(pattern).resolve(context)
            if path == curr_pattern:
        return "current"
            return ""

@register.tag
def is_current(parser, token):
    """ Check if the browse is currently at this supplied url"""
    args = token.split_contents()
    if len(args) < 2:
        raise template.TemplateSyntaxError, "%r tag requires at least one argument" % args[0]
    return isCurrentNode(args[1:])

and in your template

{% url about_page as about %}
{% url home_page as home %}
...

<ul>
    <li class="{% is_current home %}"><a href="{{ home }}">Home</a></li>
    <li class="{% is_current about %}"><a href="{{ about }}">About</a></li>
    ...

Here’s the same idea done slightly differently:

http://gnuvince.wordpress.com/2007/09/14/a-django-template-tag-for-the-current-active-page/
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/django-navbar

👤Timmy O'Mahony

3👍

How about:

<li {% if request.get_full_path == profile_edit_personal.get_absolute_url %}
    class="current"{% endif %}><a href="{% url profile_edit_personal %}">
    Personal Details</a></li>

where get_absolute_url is as discussed in the Django docs.

Its still probably not the best way to customise active nav menu headers though, there’s probably some CSS tricks that can do it without as much code. I’d say more but only had half a cup of coffee this morning..

👤Spacedman

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