Django 1.5.5: Redirect ignores locale

Question

I'm new to Django and working on a project here at work where there is that little problem I can't seem to find a fix for:

I got my project accessible by using localhost:8000/. This URL redirects to localhost:8000/en/dimension/. /en/ being the default locale of my browser so it's all good.

But the problem is, localhost:8000/fr/ still redirects to /en/dimension/ and same goes for /nl/.

Here is my urls.py file:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url
from django.conf.urls.i18n import i18n_patterns
from django.shortcuts import redirect
from django.contrib import admin


from opendataApp.views import dimensionStep, productStep, zoneStep, formatStep, geographicalAreaStep, customStep, downloadStep, proxy, downloadCustom, statistics, statisticsReset, statisticsFilter

admin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns(
    '',
    url(r'^proxy/urbis/(?P<path>.*)$', proxy),
    #translation
    (r'^i18n/', include('django.conf.urls.i18n')),
    (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),

    # Uncomment the admin/doc line below to enable admin documentation:
    #url(r'^admin/doc/', include('django.contrib.admindocs.urls')),

    # Uncomment the next line to enable the admin:
    #url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
)

urlpatterns += i18n_patterns(
    '',

    url(r'^$', lambda r: redirect('/dimension/'), name="home"),
    url(r'^dimension', dimensionStep, name="dimensionStep"),
    url(r'^product', productStep, name="productStep"),
    url(r'^zone', zoneStep, name="zoneStep"),
    url(r'^format', formatStep, name="formatStep"),
    url(r'^selection', geographicalAreaStep, name="geographicalAreaStep"),
    url(r'^custom-selection', customStep, name="custom"),
    url(r'^download/$', downloadStep, name="download"),
    url(r'^download-custom/$', downloadCustom, name="downloadCustom"),
    url(r'^statistics/$', statistics, name="statistics"),
    url(r'^statistics/reset$', statisticsReset, name="statisticsReset"),
    url(r'^statistics/filter$', statisticsFilter, name="statisticsFilter"),
    url(r'^accounts/login/$', 'django.contrib.auth.views.login'),

)

So my main issue is that redirect('/dimension/') ignores the previously asked locale and falls back to default locale again. Any idea how to fix this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The LocaleMiddleware is responsible for determining what language the browser should be served; it is consistently picking en for your browser, and you need to figure out why.

See How Django discovers language preference for the details, but the short order is:

1. look at the path prefix; for / and /dimension/ there isn't one yet.
2. look for a _language key in the session (falling back to django_language for backwards compatibility).
3. look for a django_language cookie (or whatever you set in settings.LANGUAGE_COOKIE_NAME)
4. look at the browser Accept-Language header
5. use settings.LANGUAGE_CODE.

Note that nothing sets the session key or cookie explicitly; your own code needs to do so. You can use the set_language() redirect view to do this for you; a form in your web UI would POST to that view to let a visitor set a different language.

You can also set the session key or cookie explicitly when a visitor comes to /fr/ and doesn't yet have an explicit cookie or session key. You'd do so in a view attached to ^$ in the i18n_patterns() url map (which is called for any /<language_code>/ request), instead of the redirect you have now. That view can still redirect, of course.

Even without explicitly setting the cookie, your redirect should at the very least use the request.LANGUAGE_CODE variable:

url(r'^$', lambda r: redirect('/{}/dimension/'.format(r.LANGUAGE_CODE)), name="home"),

Answer 2

Have you tried clearing your browser cache? Browsers often cache redirects.