What limitations does NDjango templates have over regular Django templates?

Question

Are there any differences, limitations or gotchas between NDjango and Django templates? I'm specifically interested in implementing them in future ASP.NET MVC projects.

I'm certain I won't be able to use any of my custom template tags that I've written for Django, but would I be able to port them to NDjango?

Answer 1

yes, you would. you can extend the default tag and filter set by writing your own and registering them on application startup. there's only one thing to keep in mind - filters were meant to be very easily extended, and so there you just have to implement one of two straight-forward interfaces (ISimpleFilter for no-parameter filters or IFilter for filters with 1 parameter). For tags, the concept is the same, but since NDjango itself is written in F#, the ITag interface is a bit more difficult to consume from C# or VB. It's certainly doable, but a bit messy. From F#, it's very straightforward.

in f# it looks like this:

/// A single tag implementation
and ITag = 
    /// Transforms a {% %} tag into a list of nodes and uncommited token list
    member Perform: Lexer.BlockToken -> IParser -> 
             Lexer.Token seq -> (Node list * Lexer.Token seq)

in c#, it looks like this:

    public Tuple<FSharpList<Interfaces.Node>, IEnumerable<Lexer.Token>>
              Perform(Lexer.BlockToken __p1, Interfaces.IParser __p2,
                   IEnumerable<Lexer.Token> __p3)

again - filters are easy in c# - in fact, a majority of the filters that come with it are written in c#. tags are easy in f#, but a bit messier in c#

in terms of limitations, there aren't any known ones, not that i'm aware of.

full disclosure - i'm one of the ndjango authors.