Highlighting Active Navigation Link - correct approach?

[Victor Hooi]

hi,

I have a project where I'm using Bootstrap (www.github.com/twitter/bootstrap) with Django.

I need to add a CSS class ("active") to highlight the active navigation link.

Anyhow, I did some Googling:

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/django-navbar
http://ilostmynotes.blogspot.com/2010/03/django-current-active-page-highlighting.html
http://gnuvince.wordpress.com/2007/09/14/a-django-template-tag-for-the-current-active-page/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/340888/navigation-in-django
http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/1726/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7665514/django-highlight-navigation-based-on-current-page

The approach in the above seems to be to either use custom template tag, middleware or JS-hackery.

Is there a current consensus in the Django community in terms of what is the "correct" approach for this?

Is there a reason something like this isn't part of Django core, or an in-built templatetag?

Cheers,
Victor

[Ivo Brodien]

Hi,

strange that nobody answered yet since I guess that almost everybody encountered the same question already.

I personally did it via a custom template tag which puts out active if the current URL matches the URL pattern for a view.

Cheers

Ivo

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[Matt Schinckel]

I have a reusable application I use for generating site-wide menu items. It does this (as well as dynamically showing/hiding menu items based on if the logged in user can access the view).

    https://bitbucket.org/schinckel/django-menus

Actually, I think that was the one I put on pypi today, too.

[Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd]]

I've actually just done a ticket about this..

https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/18584

Personally, I think the approach mentioned in the ticket is a far saner way of doing things.

Cal

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 12:55 PM, Dhiraj Thakur <dhira...@gmail.com> wrote:

i did this by  adding  {% block activepage %}{% endblock %} in my base template and in a page which extended from the basic template i added {% block activepage %} class="active" {% endblock %}  where active class does the highlight in CSS.

I think JS/jQuery is neat but if you are not comfortable with it i think templates do the trick.. :)

 

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[Melvyn Sopacua]

On 6-7-2012 16:01, Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd] wrote:
> I've actually just done a ticket about this..
>
> https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/18584
>
> Personally, I think the approach mentioned in the ticket is a far saner way
> of doing things.

Just wondering about this:
if res:
return {'urlname' : res.url_name}

a) no else clause, so there's a codepath where no dict is returned
b) if that can't be reached, then why the if statement.

Other that that, it probably needs a bit of refinement if you're going
to force a naming convention, then force the convention on how to deal
with sub menus, so that we can generate stuff like:
News
| world
>> local
| business
Polls
| current
| recent
etc and have both "news" and "local" highlighted. For example it makes
sense for urlnames like this to have a double underscore separator, so
the urlname for news/local would be news__local.
Then again, it might be overkill.
--
Melvyn Sopacua

[Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd]]

You raise a good point about sub menus.

Possibly something like this:

def resolve_urlname(request):

    """Allows us to see what the matched urlname for this

    request is within the template"""

    from django.core.urlresolvers import resolve

    try:

        res = resolve(request.path)

        if res:

            return {

                'urlname' : res.url_name,

                'urlparts' : res.url_name.split("__")

            }

    except:

        return {}

But then that forces a naming convention which might not be desired.

The other option is to see if the core devs would accept a patch which allows you to specify a 'urlname group' on the url() method in urls.py..

Cal

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