django - "Lazy load" of data from a context processor

Question

In each view of my application I need to have navigation menu prepared. So right now in every view I execute complicated query and store the menu in a dictionary which is passed to a template. In templates the variable in which I have the data is surrounded with "cache", so even though the queries are quite costly, it doesn't bother me.

But I don't want to repeat myself in every view. I guessed that the best place to prepare the menu is in my own context processor. And so I did write one, but I noticed that even when I don't use the data from the context processor, the queries used to prepare the menu are executed. Is there a way to "lazy load" such data from CP or do I have to use "low level" cache in CP? Or maybe there's a better solution to my problem?

Answer 1

Django has a SimpleLazyObject. In Django 1.3, this is used by the auth context processor (source code). This makes user available in the template context for every query, but the user is only accessed when the template contains {{ user }}.

You should be able to do something similar in your context processor.

from django.utils.functional import SimpleLazyObject
def my_context_processor(request):
    def complicated_query():
        do_stuff()
        return result

    return {
        'result': SimpleLazyObject(complicated_query)