Django - accessing the RequestContext from within a custom filter

Question

I\'ve got a filter currency, which takes a value in USD and converts it to a currency (either USD or GBP). The currency to convert to is stored in the session,

Answer 1

If you create a template tag instead of a filter, you are given the context to work with (which contains the request). http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/custom-template-tags/#writing-custom-template-tags

Answer 2

This can be done using a filter. First make sure that you have "django.core.context_processors.request" in you TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS. If you don't, you can add this to your settings.py file:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS += (
    "django.core.context_processors.request"
)

Then in your template, your filter will look like this (assuming your session variable is named 'currency_type'):

{{value|currency:request.session.currency_type}}

Or is something like this what you are considering fairly horrible?

Answer 3

I would have to agree with Adam that migrating the code to a custom tag is the best way.

However, a client needed to record the use of certain filters only when a page was published and had a HUGE inventory of templates that used the existing filter syntax. It would have been a costly undertaking to rewrite all the templates. So, I came up with this simple function that extracts the context from the call stack:

https://gist.github.com/drhoden/e05292e52fd5fc92cc3b

def get_context(max_depth=4):
    import inspect
    stack = inspect.stack()[2:max_depth]
    context = {}
    for frame_info in stack:
        frame = frame_info[0]
        arg_info = inspect.getargvalues(frame)
        if 'context' in arg_info.locals:
            context = arg_info.locals['context']
            break
    return context

Be sure to read my warnings, but this DOES give standard filters access to the context (when it is available) WITHOUT having to turn your filter into a tag.

Answer 4

A somehow less hacky solution to Daniel Rhoden's proposal is, to use threading.local(). Define a middleware class, which stores your request as a global object inside your local thread, and add that class to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES.

Now a template filter can easily access that request object.