Alternate Row Coloring in Django Template with More Than One Set of Rows

Question

Django templates offer the builtin tag cycle for alternating between several values at different points in a template (or for loop in a template) but this tag d

Answer 1

Give up and use Jinja2 Template System

I gave up on django template language, it's very restricted in what you can do with it. Jinja2 uses the same syntax that the django template uses, but adds many enhancements over it.

EDIT/NOTE ( I know it sounds like a big switch for just a minor issue, but in reality I bet you always find yourself fighting the default template system in django, so it really is worthwhile and I believe it will make you more productive in the long run. )

You can read this article written by its author, although it's technical, he mentions the problem of the {% cycle %} tag in django.

Jinja doesn't have a cycle tag, it has a cycle method on the loop:

{% for user in users %}
    <li class="{{ loop.cycle('odd', 'even') }}">{{ user }}</li>
{% endfor %}

A major advantage of Jinja2 is that it allows you to use logic for the presentation, so if you have a list of pictures, you can put them in a table, because you can start a new row inside a table every N elements, see, you can do for example:

{% if loop.index is divisibleby(5) %}   
     </tr>
     {% if not loop.last %}
     <tr>
     {% endif %}
{% endif %}

you can also use mathematical expressions:

{% if x > 10 %}

and you can access your python functions directly (but some setup is required to specify which functions should be exposed for the template)

{% for item in normal_python_function_that_returns_a_query_or_a_list() %}

even set variables ..

{% set variable_name = function_that_returns_an_object_or_something() %}