Passing variables from Flask to JavaScript

Simple way to pass variables from flask view to template to javascript file with simple example mentioned by @mauro.

main.py

@app.route('/')
def hello():
    data = {'username': 'Pang', 'site': 'stackoverflow.com'}
    return render_template('settings.html', data=data)

settings.html

<html>
    <head>
         <script type="text/javascript">
            var username = {{ data.username }}
            var site = {{ data.site }}
        </script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="app.js"></script>
    </head>
</html>

app.js

function myFunc() {
    return username + site
}

The mobiusklein answers is pretty good, but there is "hack" you should consider. Define your Javascript method to receive params and send data as params to your function.

main.py

@app.route('/')
def hello():
    data = {'username': 'Pang', 'site': 'stackoverflow.com'}
    return render_template('settings.html', data=data)

app.js

function myFunc(vars) {
    return vars
}

settings.html

<html>
    <head>
         <script type="text/javascript" {{ url_for('static', filename='app.js')}}></script>
         <script type="text/javascript">
            myVar = myFunc({{data|tojson}})
         </script>
    </head>
</html>


<script type="text/javascript">
   var username ='{{ data.username }}'
   var site ='{{ data.site}}'
<script>

The reason is that jinja2 needs to be used to perform the substitution, which from your code doesn't appear to be happening.

Chances are you're serving app.js as a static file, which means that it is never looked at by the templating engine machinery, just served as is.

You can accomplish what you're describing by serving app.js from a URL which is tied to an action which passes the contents of app.js through Flask's render_template function, performing jinja2 substitutions, and all the other customization information, but that means jinja2 has to parse the whole file, which can be expensive.

You might try to pass those variables along using an AJAX request responded to by an action that sends back that same data in JSON. This is a much more common practice, and has the added value of making that data visible to other resources.

Tags:

Python

Javascript

Flask

Pubnub

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