Using Jinja (Django) templates in Zato frontend services

Jinja is a templating language that Zato services can use to output HTML or other static resources typically needed by backend dashboards and other frontend applications.
For instance, a Zato service could accept input from frontend, connect to multiple backend systems to obtain the required data and then return a HTML with all the information ready for the frontend to display.
Note that Jinja is sufficiently similar to the templates that Django uses and if you know the latter, using Jinja will come naturally.
Zato already ships with Jinja and there is no need to install it separately.

Outputting HTML

Here is a sample frontend service that returns an HTML list representing clients. For simplicity, the actual information is returned directly from the "get_data" function but a real service could look it up in an external data store. Regardless of where the data comes from, the usage of Jinja is the same.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# Jinja
from jinja2 import Template

# Zato
from zato.server.service import Service

# ########################################################################################
# ########################################################################################

template = Template("""
    <ol>
        {% for item in items %}
            <li>{{ item }}</li>
        {% endfor %}
    </ol>
""")

# ########################################################################################
# ########################################################################################

class FrontedJinja(Service):

    name = 'api.frontend.jinja'

    def get_data(self):

        return [
            'Jane Doe',
            'John Brown',
            'Jackie Smith',
        ]

    def handle(self) -> 'None':

        # Obtain our data to produce the HTML for
        data = self.get_data()

        # A dictionary with configuration for the template
        config = {
            'items': data
        }

        # Generate HTML
        html = template.render(**config)

        # Assign HTML payload to the response
        self.response.payload = html

        # Set the output Content-Type as well
        self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/html'

# ########################################################################################
# ########################################################################################

The service will produce the following:

<ol>
    <li>Jane Doe</li>
    <li>John Brown</li>
    <li>Jackie Smith</li>
</ol>

Note that Jinja can be used to output other formats as well, e.g. CSV or any other information that will be easier to output with a templating language instead of constructing the responses manually.

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