How do I get the class of a object within a Django template?

Question

If I have a list of objects that require similar layouts but need some attribute set based on the class of object how can I go about getting the class name while class

Answer 1

A little dirty solution

If objects is a QuerySet that belong to a model, you can add a custom method to your model.

 class mymodel(models.Model):
     foo = models........


 def get_cname(self):
    class_name = ....
    return class_name 

then in your template you can try:

{% for obj in objects %}
   <div class="{{obj.get_cname}}">
     ..
  </div>
{% endfor }}

Answer 2

You can also write a custom filter. My use case was to check whether or not an html element in a Django form was a checkbox. This code has been tested with Django 1.4.

I followed the instructions about Custom Filters. My filter code looks as such.

In myapp/templatetags/class_tag.py:

from django import template
register = template.Library()
@register.filter(name='get_class')
def get_class(value):
  return value.__class__.__name__

In your template file:

{% load class_tag %}

{% if Object|get_class == 'AClassName' %}
 do something
{% endif %}


{{ Object|get_class }}

Answer 3

David's suggestion of a custom filter is great if you need this for several classes.

The Django docs neglect to mention that the dev server won't detect new templatetags automatically, however, so until I restarted it by hand I was stuck with a TemplateSyntaxError class_tag is not a registered tag library.

.

Answer 4

a bit simpler; assuming your layout is a list of a single model:

class ObjectListView(ListView):
    model = Person
    template_name = 'object_list.html'

    def model_name(self):
        return self.model._meta.verbose_name

Then in object_list.html:

{% for obj in object_list %}
    <div class="{{view.model_name}}">...</div>
{% endfor }}