It seems that cleanly and easily doing AJAX views in Django is an area that gives a lot of people trouble. We like to do views as straight HTTP if at all possible, but there are always interactions that would be better served by not having a page load. We're also big fans of django-tastypie but it's a whole other ball of wax on its own, especially if you want to have views that write to the database. So, for the purposes of getting everyone up to speed doing AJAX with Django, we'll ignore Tastypie for now and just stick with ordinary views.

Django automatic CSRF To start things off, put this bit of Javascript from the Django docs into a script that's loaded on all the pages where you'll be needing to perform AJAX views. This allows you to ignore the CSRF token for AJAX views, but it will be added as a request header. We previously said this could be seen as a security loophole and that same-origin came into effect. Both of these statements are wrong.

AJAX & Form Field Errors Before we get to the Django side, there are a few small scripts that we recycle on every project. function apply_form_field_error ( fieldname , error ) { var input = $ ( "#id_" + fieldname ), container = $ ( "#div_id_" + fieldname ), error_msg = $ ( "<span />" ). addClass ( "help-inline ajax-error" ). text ( error [ 0 ]); container . addClass ( "error" ); error_msg . insertAfter ( input ); } function clear_form_field_errors ( form ) { $ ( ".ajax-error" , $ ( form )). remove (); $ ( ".error" , $ ( form )). removeClass ( "error" ); } These two functions are pretty self-explanatory, but I'll go over them anyway. The first, apply_form_field_error , takes a field name and an error, finds the field on the page and sets the error text to the passed-in error. Our selectors here take advantage of how Twitter Bootstrap renders forms, so you may need to change the selectors to match your own markup. The second, clear_form_field_errors , removes the above text and classes, basicaly resetting the form. It's important to run this script before every AJAX submission so you don't get doubled-up errors if someone submits invalid data on the same field twice. You could add it to jQuery's beforeSend if you don't want to have to think about it. There are a couple more useful utility functions that we thought might be useful for some people. function django_message ( msg , level ) { var levels = { warning : 'alert' , error : 'error' , success : 'success' , info : 'info' }, source = $ ( '#message_template' ). html (), template = Handlebars . compile ( source ), context = { 'tags' : levels [ level ], 'message' : msg }, html = template ( context ); $ ( "#message_area" ). append ( html ); } function django_block_message ( msg , level ) { var source = $ ( "#message_block_template" ). html (), template = Handlebars . compile ( source ), context = { level : level , body : msg }, html = template ( context ); $ ( "#message_area" ). append ( html ); } These two scripts mirror Django's messages app's functionality. Both use Handlebars to render the template, but you could use any Javascript templating library you'd like. Our templates look like so: {% load verbatim_tag %} <script id= "message_template" type= "text/x-handlebars-template" > { % verbatim % } < div class = "alert alert-{{tags}} fade in" data - alert = "{{tags}}" > < a class = "close" title = "Close" href = "#" data - dismiss = "alert" >& times ; < /a> {{{ message }}} < /div> { % endverbatim % } </script> <script id= "message_block_template" type= "text/x-handlebars-template" > { % verbatim % } < div class = "alert alert-block alert-{{level}} fade in" > < a class = "close" title = "Close" href = "#" data - dismiss = "alert" >& times ; < /a> {{{ body }}} < /div> { % endverbatim % } </script> The verbatim tag there is from Eric Florenzano and makes including Javascript templates in your Django-parsed HTML really easy. We include these in a base template and provide a spot in the rest of the document to attach them to. Again, this is based largely on Twitter Bootstrap, so your markup will vary.

AJAX Views So now let's get down to the good stuff. The following view is very generic and only shows the basic concept, but we're sure you'll get the gist of it. from django.http import HttpResponse, HttpResponseBadRequest from django.utils import simplejson as json from django.views.generic import UpdateView from braces.views import LoginRequiredMixin, PermissionRequiredMixin class PonyAjaxUpdateView(LoginRequiredMixin, PermissionRequiredMixin, UpdateView): form_class = PonyForm model = Pony permission_required = "ponies.change_pony" def form_valid(self, form): """ If the request is ajax, save the form and return a json response. Otherwise return super as expected. """ if self.request.is_ajax(): self.object = form.save() return HttpResponse(json.dumps("success"), mimetype="application/json") return super(PonyAjaxUpdateView, self).form_valid(form) def form_invalid(self, form): """ We haz errors in the form. If ajax, return them as json. Otherwise, proceed as normal. """ if self.request.is_ajax(): return HttpResponseBadRequest(json.dumps(form.errors), mimetype="application/json") return super(PonyAjaxUpdateView, self).form_invalid(form) Again, nothing special in the view. We use an UpdateView so we can, technically, still use the view without AJAX. Assuming that the POST data that comes in validates on the form, our form_valid method will fire, which checks to see if the request was made via AJAX and, if so, returns a success string. Quite often we like to return a serialized version of the object that was just created or updated, but that takes some special considerations when it comes to Django model objects. If you don't need the object back, returning a standard HttpResponse or one with a message, like demonstrated above, is enough. When returning JSON, make sure to include the mimetype="application/json" in your HttpResponse . Without the proper mimetype you will be dealing with text/html content instead of JSON. If your view creates new objects or deletes old ones, returning proper status codes, like 201 for Created is a very polite thing to do, especially if you think your view will end up as part of an ad hoc API. Similarly, above, if the form is invalid, we serialize the form errors (note: not the non_field_errors() errors) and send them back to the view. The script we wrote above, apply_form_field_error can be called in a loop for each error in the list and update your form so the users know what they did wrong. note Did you notice the braces package we used in the above view? That's a package we released from a previous blog post on custom class-based view mixins. You can get it on Github or PyPI. Form Errors The difference between form.errors and form.non_field_errors() : form.errors are any errors directly related to a field in your form, form.non_field_errors() would include errors raised by a custom clean() method and are put into a special "field" called __all__ .

The jQuery Side HTML <form id= "pony_form" method= "POST" action= "{% url pony_update_view pony.pk %}" > {% csrf_token %} <label for= "id_name" > Pony Name </label> <input type= "text" name= "name" id= "id_name" > <input type= "submit" value= "Submit" > </form> This isn't anything special, as you can see. Just a standard HTML form, like would be rendered by Django's form template filters (e.g. {{ form|as_ul }} ). If you need to perform AJAX tasks on non-form elemnts, the HTML5-added data- attribute is really handy. We use it a lot for holding on to URLs and primary keys like: <li data-url="{% url pony_update_view pony.pk %}" data-pk="{{ pony.pk }}">{{ pony.name }}</li> . This is useful for sortable interfaces, for example. jQuery $ ( document ). on ( "submit" , "#pony_form" , function ( e ) { e . preventDefault (); var self = $ ( this ), url = self . attr ( "action" ), ajax_req = $ . ajax ({ url : url , type : "POST" , data : { name : self . find ( "#id_name" ). val () }, success : function ( data , textStatus , jqXHR ) { django_message ( "Pony saved successfully." , "success" ); }, error : functior ( data , textStatus , jqXHR ) { var errors = $ . parseJSON ( data . responseText ); $ . each ( errors , function ( index , value ) { if ( index === "__all__" ) { django_message ( value [ 0 ], "error" ); } else { apply_form_field_error ( index , value ); } }); } }); }); Again, nothing special if you're used to doing AJAX requests in jQuery. We stop the form from actually submitting using preventDefault() on the submission event, then build a few variables. Luckily we can get the URL directly off the form; this is part of why we end up using the data- attributes a lot, so we can separate our templates from our Javascript. We typically go through and name out the keys that we want to send through to the backend view in the data dict, but you could use serialization options provided by jQuery or another plugin. These just seem to have a lot of quirks that we'd rather not take into consideration (especially not for an example in a blog post). Our way is definitely more manual but less error-prone. We then provide success and error attributes for the .ajax() call. These can be provided outside of the .ajax() call, which is very useful if your code is more modular, but we rarely have need of that approach. The success function just prints out a message to the user, letting them know everything saved correctly. This is where you would update UI elements or whatever your use case requires. The error function turns the JSON string that our view returned into a Javascript object so we can dig through it more easily (no one likes to parse text). We loop through all of the provided errors and, depending on if their key indicates them to be global or field-specific, render them out to the page for the user. Again, this is where you'd want to update your interface.