Django: send data to server without rendering new template

Question

I am creating a website with Django, and I want the user to be able to press a button which will send some data to my server, for example to add an entry to a database with a HTTP post request. I could do this by creating an HTML form, and in the action attribute, point to a view which will do the data processing, and then render a template.

However, what if I do not want to have to render a template? If I want the user to click the button to process some data on the server, but I don't want to render a new template through a view function, how can this be done? I want to maintain the current rendered HTML in the browser, but the only way I know to send data to the server involves rendering a new template in the view function.

Any help? Thanks.

Answer 1

Simply return 204 No Content answer from your view.

Answer 2

Nothing in Django says that a view has to render a template. That's just one of many things a view can do. A view simply needs to return an HttpResponse.

Whether that HttpResponse body contains HTML, etc, is completely up to you. You also don't need a form to post data to your server. You can send any arbitrary data you need simply using JavaScript. You can still use form elements like input, textarea, etc; they don't have to be contained in a form element to be valid.

To make a long answer short, you need to use JavaScript to send data to your Django application via ajax, process the data, and return a response in JSON or XML format, which you can then use to update your page, etc. You can write vanilla JavaScript to do this, or leverage a library like jQuery, or if you're really, really lazy, you can use something like Dajax.

Answer 3

As I said in my previous answer to you, the normal way of doing this in Django is to post to the same view, which accepts the data and then either re-renders the same template (eg to show errors) or redirects to another URL.

Another approach would be to do the post with Ajax.

Answer 4

You can achieve this by send ajax request to your server .
Here you need to write a ajax request which will execute django view and return response into json, xml format .
You can display latest data into your template as per your need.
Ajax request

function mail_check() {
var val = $("#val").val();
$.getJSON('/test/'+val+"/",

function(data) {
// render changes content     
});}

Django view

def checkemailavailability(request, val):
    message = {'result':''}
    if request.is_ajax():
        # put logic here
        #json = simplejson.dumps()   convert data into json
        return HttpResponse(json, mimetype='application/json')

Note : do not forget to include jquery
Links : stackoverflow, tangowith django , bradmontgomery.net