Access Model Data from Django Base Template

I have a model Category, and I want its objects to always be displayed in a navigation menu in 开发者_StackOverflow中文版my base.html template (which all of my other templates extend).

I want to learn best-practices so would like to know what the correct/accepted way of providing this data to the template is.

Use a custom context processor:

In context_processors.py:

def categories(request):
    return {
        'categories': Categories.objects.all()
    }

And add it to your settings.py:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    # ... django's default context processors
    "your_app.context_processors.categories", 
)

You could create a custom tag for the categories and place it in the base template. That way you wont have to send a "category" variable to the context on every view ..

Good Luck

Just a heads up for anyone using later versions of Django (i.e. 1.9): the way that Django defines its context processors has changed. Instead of adding to TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS you can just add a line to Django's list of context processors:

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
        'DIRS': [],
        'APP_DIRS': True,
        'OPTIONS': {
            'context_processors': [
                'django.template.context_processors.debug',
                'django.template.context_processors.request',
                'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
                'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',
                'app.context_processors.your_processor', # CHANGE THIS
            ],
        },
    },
]

Hope this helps!