Working with tables

Suppose you want to build a document which iterates over a variable to create a table with a number of rows. For example, you want to create the table containg the list of purchases for a given user, like this:

Num	Purchase	Price
1	The Quick Python Book	$15.90
2	Python Essential Reference	$29.54
3	Python in a Nutshell, Second Edition	$25.02
4	HTML5: Up and Running	$18.48

The problem is that XML code to produce such a template would look roughly like this:

<table:table table:name="Table1">
    ...
    <table:table-row>
        <table:table-cell><text:p>Num</text:p></table:table-cell>
        <table:table-cell><text:p>Purchase</text:p>
        </table:table-cell>
        <table:table-cell><text:p>Price</text:p></table:table-cell>
    </table:table-row>
    {% for item in purchases %}
    <table:table-row>
        <table:table-cell><text:p>{{ forloop.counter }}</text:p></table:table-cell>
        <table:table-cell><text:p>{{ item.name }}</text:p></table:table-cell>
        <table:table-cell><text:p>${{ item.price }}</text:p></table:table-cell>
    </table:table-row>
    {% endfor %}
</table:table>

The obvious problem is that there is no place in word processor to insert {% for ... %} ... {% endfor %} template tags, all you can do is to write those tags within <text:p> XML tag.

Here the xmlfor pseudo tag comes to rescue. Instead of templating plain XML, you can use {% xmlfor %} tag in the first row of the cell, and {% endxmlfor %} in the last one. Like this:

The xmlfor is a bit of magic which django-webodt uses to simplify the work. This magic is incapsulated in “ODF template preprocessors” which defined in WEBODT_ODF_TEMPLATE_PREPROCESSORS settings variable. The xmlfor preprocessor gets the template source and then replaces {% xmlfor ... %} ... {% endxmlfor %} psuedo tags with {% for ... %}...{% endfor %} ones placing those new tags exactly where you would expect them to find.

The output will look like presented below.