Introduction to Tornado

Chapter 3. Extending Templates

In Chapter 2, we saw how the Tornado template system could be used to easily pass information from handlers to web pages, letting you keep your web markup clean while easily interpolating dynamic data. However, most sites will want to make use of repurposable content like headers, footers, and layout grids. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at how you can accomplish this by extending Tornado templates, or using UI modules.

Blocks and Substitutions

When you’ve taken the time to set up and lay out templates for your web application, it only seems logical that you’d want to reuse your frontend code as much as your backend Python, right? Fortunately, Tornado lets you do just that. Tornado supports template inheritance through extends and block statements, which give you the control and flexibility to make fluid templates that can be repurposed as you see fit.

To extend an existing template, you just need to put an {% extends "filename.html" %} at the top of the new template file. For example, to extend a parent template (main.html here) into a new template, you’d just use:

{% extends "main.html" %}

This will let the new file inherit all the markup of main.html, and then overwrite content where desired. With this system, you can create master templates, switch in other subpages for special needs, and have both default and dynamic text and markup ready to go.

Basics of Blocks

Extending a template makes it easy to repurpose content you’ve previously written, but ...