Writing a django filter

I recently had to implement a django filter. My problem was that I had an event page similar to the github feed. I wanted to format a date diferently whether the event occured in the current week or at another date. Instead of doing it in code or in the template (bad), I decided to write a filter for that.

Directory structure

Django expects to find the filters and template tag for an application in a specific directory, templatetags. You’ll have to create this directory if it doesn’t already exist and to add inside it an empty __init__.py file so that python treats the folder as a module.

Code

After that, create a file named “filters.py”. It will hold our new filter. Add the following code in it.

from django import template
from django.contrib.sites.models import Site
from urlparse import urlparse
import datetime

register = template.Library()

@register.filter(name='dayinweek', is_safe=True, expects_localtime=True)
def dayincurrentweek(day):
    if day == datetime.date.today():
        return "Today"

    min_date = datetime.date.today() - datetime.timedelta(7)
    if day > min_date and day < datetime.date.today():
        return day.strftime("Last %A")
    else:
        return day.strftime("%B, %d")

It’s quite simple: we get a handle on the django template filter registry, and we register a template named dayinweek. This template takes a datetime.date parameter and returns a string.

Usage

To reference the filter in your template file you need to add {% load filters %} at the beginning of your template file.