HTML Templating – Output a Grid in a Single Loop

It was about a two years ago. I was working on a food startup and needed to display some food photos in a six-column grid. The image below shows what the end result looked like:

I was using Bootstrap, which requires an HTML element to be wrapped around each column and each row. Here’s a sample of Bootstrap showing two rows of four columns each:

<!-- 2 row - 4 column grid -->

<div class="row">
    <div class="col-md-3">Item 1</div>
    <div class="col-md-3">Item 2</div>
    <div class="col-md-3">Item 3</div>
    <div class="col-md-3">Item 4</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
    <div class="col-md-3">Item 5</div>
    <div class="col-md-3">Item 6</div>
    <div class="col-md-3">Item 7</div>
    <div class="col-md-3">Item 8</div>
</div>

My first attempt at a solution involved putting the items in a 2D grid and using nested loops in the HTML template. I had to transform the data to look like this:

var items = [
    [ 1, 2, 3, 4],
    [ 5, 6, 7, 8]
]

This required a template that looked like this:

<!-- Django Templating -->

{% for row in rows %}
    <div class="row">
        {% for item in row %}
            <div class="col-md-3">{{ item }}</div>
        {% endfor %}
    </div>
{% endfor %}

While that solution worked fine, I wanted to simplify it and keep the grid logic in the template. Ideally, the data would be kept in a regular array like this:

var items = [
    1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
]

After a lot of thinking and failure, I ended up coming up with a fairly elegant solution. It’s a bit hard to explain how it work so I put together some simple pseudocode that hopefully explains the algorithm without cluttering it up with ugly HTML tags.

/** Pseudocode for Printing Grids **/

PRINT "[["
FOR all items
    PRINT "<< COUNT >>"
    IF last column in row
        PRINT "]] [["
PRINT "]]"

/** Output for 5 Items */
"[[ << 1 >> << 2 >> << 3 >> ]] [[ << 4 >> << 5 >> ]]"


/**
    Note that for 6 items it will print an empty row at
    the end unless you also check that it's not the last
    item in the loop.
*/

Now that we have a rough idea of what our code needs to look like, we can write some actual HTML.

{% raw %}

<!-- Django Templating -->

<div class="row">

    {% for item in items %}
    <div class="col-md-3">{{ item }}</div>

        <!-- if last column in row -->
        {% if forloop.counter | divisibleby:"4" and not forloop.last %}
        </div><div class="row">
        {% endif %}

    {% endfor %}

</div>

And that’s it. We can now generate a grid layout in a single loop without changing the way our data looks.

I hope this explanation was clear enough. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or comments.

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