Templating in Pecan

Pecan includes support for a variety of templating engines and also makes it easy to add support for new template engines. Currently, Pecan supports:

Template System

Renderer Name

Mako

mako

Genshi

genshi

Kajiki

kajiki

Jinja2

jinja

JSON

json

The default template system is mako, but that can be changed by passing the default_renderer key in your application’s configuration:

app = {
    'default_renderer' : 'kajiki',
    # ...
}

Using Template Renderers

pecan.decorators defines a decorator called expose(), which is used to flag a method as a public controller. The expose() decorator takes a template argument, which can be used to specify the path to the template file to use for the controller method being exposed.

class MyController(object):
    @expose('path/to/mako/template.html')
    def index(self):
        return dict(message='I am a mako template')

expose() will use the default template engine unless the path is prefixed by another renderer name.

@expose('kajiki:path/to/kajiki/template.html')
def my_controller(self):
    return dict(message='I am a kajiki template')

See also

Overriding Templates

override_template() allows you to override the template set for a controller method when it is exposed. When override_template() is called within the body of the controller method, it changes the template that will be used for that invocation of the method.

class MyController(object):
    @expose('template_one.html')
    def index(self):
        # ...
        override_template('template_two.html')
        return dict(message='I will now render with template_two.html')

Manual Rendering

render() allows you to manually render output using the Pecan templating framework. Pass the template path and values to go into the template, and render() returns the rendered output as text.

@expose()
def controller(self):
    return render('my_template.html', dict(message='I am the namespace'))

The JSON Renderer

Pecan also provides a JSON renderer, which you can use by exposing a controller method with @expose('json').

See also

Defining Custom Renderers

To define a custom renderer, you can create a class that follows the renderer protocol:

class MyRenderer(object):
    def __init__(self, path, extra_vars):
        '''
        Your renderer is provided with a path to templates,
        as configured by your application, and any extra
        template variables, also as configured
        '''
        pass

    def render(self, template_path, namespace):
        '''
        Lookup the template based on the path, and render
        your output based upon the supplied namespace
        dictionary, as returned from the controller.
        '''
        return str(namespace)

To enable your custom renderer, define a custom_renderers key in your application’s configuration:

app = {
    'custom_renderers' : {
        'my_renderer' : MyRenderer
    },
    # ...
}

…and specify the renderer in the expose() method:

class RootController(object):

    @expose('my_renderer:template.html')
    def index(self):
        return dict(name='Bob')