Sneak some advanced logic into a Django template

I was adding on an app to a Django project at work where I was overriding an existing template but did not have access to the view that called that template. I was left in a scenario where I had the variables that the view was originally set up with, but non of the new models that I had added.

In a filter you can do whatever logic you want, and then pass information back to the view. Please keep in mind, this is probably a horrible practice, but it does have its uses. In this specific scenario I needed to query the new models without modifying the existing view, solution: add a filter and do the querying there.

This is the filter that I used to do the querying:

{% verbatim %}
from django import template
from stager.jira.models import JiraProject, ProjectLink
from stager.staging.models import *

register = template.Library()

def has_jira(value, arg):
    client = Client.objects.get(path=value)
    project = client.projects.get(path=arg)
    try:
        jiras = ProjectLink.objects.get(ClientProject=project).JiraProject.exclude(filter_id='')
        return True
    except:
        return False
register.filter('has_jira', has_jira)
{% endverbatim %}

Then, in my template:

{% verbatim %}
{% load has_jira %}
{% if client.path|has_jira:project.path %}
     <li><a href="jira/projects" >Jira</a></li>
{% endif %}
{% endverbatim %}

A more general example if this would be to work around the annoyance of not being able to have multiple tests in an if statement in a template: You can’t do {% verbatim %} {% if this and that %} {% endverbatim %}

A solution would be:

{% verbatim %}
def if_and(value, arg):
    if value and arg:
        return True
    else:
        return False

def if_or(value, arg):
    if value or arg:
        return True
    else:
        return False
{% endverbatim %}

{% verbatim %}
{% if True|if_and:False %}
show
{% else %}
don't show
{% endif %}
{% endverbatim %}

Let me know your thoughts, pros/cons of this method.

Ai's stager project is open source and can be found at [github](http://github.com/aiaio/ai-stager