UUID template tag for Django

A while back, I had posted a template tag on djangosnippets which generates UUIDs on the fly. Thought I’d share the same snippet here.

My rationale for writing this: I needed a quick way to generate random IDs to assign to dynamically generated HTML elements and then use jQuery to wire them all up.

from django.template import Library, Node, TemplateSyntaxError
from uuid import uuid4

register = Library()

class UUIDNode( Node ):
    """
    Implements the logic of this tag.
    """
    def __init__( self, var_name ):
        self.var_name = var_name

    def render( self, context ):
        context[ self.var_name ] = str( uuid4() )
        return ''

def do_uuid( parser, token ):
    """
    The purpose of this template tag is to generate a random
    UUID and store it in a named context variable.

    Sample usage:
        {% uuid var_name %}
        var_name will contain the generated UUID
    """
    try:
        tag_name, var_name = token.split_contents()
    except ValueError:
        raise TemplateSyntaxError, "%r tag requires exactly one argument" % token.contents.split()[ 0 ]
    return UUIDNode( var_name )

do_uuid = register.tag( 'uuid', do_uuid )