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by jungletime 2142 days ago
As someone that has an active app still written in Django 1.6. The larger my project and more complicate the more I wanted to ditch the model/view/template separation. And attach methods to the model so that it can be called from everywhere, returning html code in a string directly.

Other times, I wished Django had something analogous to a component, where everything is just encapsulated in a single file. I don't want to separate javascript/html/css view/template. I want a single file I need to update and an easy way to call to render.

The template system is also difficult to use, if you get complicated scenarios.

I needed to show event details in a modal if that was the user preference. But the page could also be embedded. This lead to me having to render differently depending on the device, whether it was embedded and if it was a popup or not. This lead to an explosion of possibilities, a total 2x2x2 = 8 different views for the same data in the same template.

The most practical way was with if / then statements but that still lead to me repeating html code. And being difficult to reason about and test.

I also got into situation where the template wasn't parsed and updated. Probably because of too many includes or inheritance in the template. For example, I wanted to write a custom css file that would use google fonts that the user selected in the UI. The only way I found to work was to bypass the template and write a function in the view that would render_to_string the css file.
2 comments
mixmastamyk 2141 days ago
> I don't want to separate javascript/html/css view/template. I want a single file

This was always possible.

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canada_dry 2141 days ago
>> I want a single file > This was always possible.

Any good (code/github) examples of this??

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mixmastamyk 2141 days ago 

    <body>
        <style>...</style>
        <script>...</script>
        …
    </body>
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neurostimulant 2141 days ago
Honestly, for complex ui like this, I prefer to write it as a separate frontend app written in react/typescript. Django template system is great for normal websites (e.g. news/blog/ecommerce websites), but for complex application ui you'll start encountering pains like you mentioned. Implementing complex ui with a lot of interactivity is just easier in react. The drawback is now you have to implement an api layer to bridge django and react, which actually not that bad using django rest framework or even vanilla django views.
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