Django render_to_response

It is important to see how django doesn’t automatically appends the context variables to the request object.

Say you want to access MEDIA_URL in your templates, using the following code will not work since the context is not created and it is not passed to the render_to_response function

def my_view(request):
    return render_to_response('my_template.html',
                              my_data_dictionary)

The first solution is to build the context and pass it to the render_to_response function, like this:

def my_view(request):
    return render_to_response('my_template.html',
                              my_data_dictionary,
                              context_instance=RequestContext(request))

But, this is kind of repetitive and boring. So a django snippet was proposed for that in http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/3/

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.template import RequestContext

def render_response(req, *args, **kwargs):
    kwargs['context_instance'] = RequestContext(req)
    return render_to_response(*args, **kwargs)

That works, But django just implemented almost the same thing in generic views. So, the solution I prefer is using the direct_to_template generic view

def my_view(request):
    # View code here...
    return direct_to_tempalte(request,
                                        template_name='my_template.html',
                                        extra_context=some_dict)