Question

I’m tooling around with Django and I’m wondering if there is a simple way to create a ‘back’ link to the previous page using the template system.

I figure that in the worst case I can get this information from the request object in the view function, and pass it along to the template rendering method, but I’m hoping I can avoid all this boilerplate code somehow.

I’ve checked the Django template docs and I haven’t seen anything that mentions this explicitly.

Answer 1

Well you can enable:

'django.core.context_processors.request', 

in your settings.TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS block and hook out the referrer but that’s a bit nauseating and could break all over the place.

Most places where you’d want this (eg the edit post page on SO) you have a real object to hook on to (in that example, the post) so you can easily work out what the proper previous page should be.