Question

I have written a view which responds to ajax requests from browser. It’s written like so –

@login_required
def no_response(request):
    params = request.has_key("params")
    if params:
        # do processing
        var = RequestContext(request, {vars})
        return render_to_response('some_template.html', var)
    else: #some error
        # I want to send an empty string so that the 
        # client-side javascript can display some error string. 
        return render_to_response("") #this throws an error without a template.

How do i do it?

Here’s how I handle the server response on client-side –

    $.ajax
    ({
        type     : "GET",
        url      : url_sr,
        dataType : "html",
        cache    : false,
        success  : function(response)
        {
            if(response)
                $("#resp").html(response);
            else
                $("#resp").html("<div id='no'>No data</div>");
        }
    });

Answer 1

render_to_response is a shortcut specifically for rendering a template. If you don’t want to do that, just return an empty HttpResponse:

 from django.http import HttpResponse
 return HttpResponse('')

However, in this circumstance I wouldn’t do that – you’re signalling to the AJAX that there was an error, so you should return an error response, possibly code 400 – which you can do by using HttpResponseBadRequest instead.